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Juniper vQFX#

Juniper vQFX virtualized router is identified with juniper_vqfx kind in the topology file. It is built using vrnetlab project and essentially is a Qemu VM packaged in a docker container format.

Warning

The public vQFX image that is downloadable from the Juniper portal mentions version 20.2, but in fact, it is a 19.4 system. Until this issue is fixed (and it seems no one cares), rename the downloaded qcow2 file to mention the 19.4 version before building the container image.

Managing Juniper vQFX nodes#

Note

Containers with vQFX inside will take ~7min to fully boot.
You can monitor the progress with docker logs -f <container-name>.

Juniper vQFX node launched with containerlab can be managed via the following interfaces:

to connect to a bash shell of a running Juniper vQFX container: 

docker exec -it <container-name/id> bash

to connect to the vQFX CLI (password admin@123) 

ssh admin@<container-name/id>

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Info

Default user credentials: admin:admin@123

Interface naming#

You can use interfaces names in the topology file like they appear in Juniper vQFX.

The interface naming convention is: et-0/0/X (or ge-0/0/X, xe-0/0/X, all are accepted), where X denotes the port number.

With that naming convention in mind:

  • et-0/0/0 - first data port available
  • et-0/0/1 - second data port, and so on...

Note

Data port numbering starts at 0.

The example ports above would be mapped to the following Linux interfaces inside the container running the Juniper vQFX VM:

Juniper vJunosEvolved container can have up to 17 interfaces and uses the following mapping rules:

  • eth0 - management interface connected to the containerlab management network
  • eth1 - first data interface, mapped to a first data port of vJunosEvolved VM, which is et-0/0/0 and not et-0/0/1.
  • eth2+ - second and subsequent data interface

When containerlab launches Juniper vQFX node the management interface of the VM gets assigned 10.0.0.15/24 address from the QEMU DHCP server. This interface is transparently stitched with container's eth0 interface such that users can reach the management plane of the Juniper vQFX using containerlab's assigned IP.

Data interfaces et-0/0/0+ need to be configured with IP addressing manually using CLI or other available management interfaces.

Features and options#

Node configuration#

Juniper vQFX nodes come up with a basic configuration where only the control plane and line cards are provisioned, as well as the admin user with the provided password.

Startup configuration#

It is possible to make vQFX nodes boot up with a user-defined startup-config instead of a built-in one. With a startup-config property of the node/kind user sets the path to the config file that will be mounted to a container and used as a startup-config:

topology:
  nodes:
    node:
      kind: juniper_vqfx
      startup-config: myconfig.txt

With this knob containerlab is instructed to take a file myconfig.txt from the directory that hosts the topology file, and copy it to the lab directory for that specific node under the /config/startup-config.cfg name. Then the directory that hosts the startup-config dir is mounted to the container. This will result in this config being applied at startup by the node.

Configuration is applied after the node is started, thus it can contain partial configuration snippets that you desire to add on top of the default config that a node boots up with.

Lab examples#

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