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Cisco XRv#

Cisco XRv virtualized router is identified with vr-xrv or vr-cisco_xrv kind in the topology file. It is built using vrnetlab project and essentially is a Qemu VM packaged in a docker container format.

vr-xrv nodes launched with containerlab come up pre-provisioned with SSH, SNMP, NETCONF and gNMI (if available) services enabled.

Warning

XRv image is discontinued by Cisco and supreceded by XRv 9000 image. It was added to containerlab because the image is lightweight, compared to XRv9k. If recent features are needed, use vr-xrv9k kind.

Managing vr-xrv nodes#

Note

Containers with XRv inside will take ~5min to fully boot.
You can monitor the progress with docker logs -f <container-name>.

Cisco XRv node launched with containerlab can be managed via the following interfaces:

to connect to a bash shell of a running vr-xrv container: 

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

to connect to the XRv CLI 

ssh clab@<container-name/id>

NETCONF server is running over port 830 

ssh clab@<container-name> -p 830 -s netconf

using the best in class gnmic gNMI client as an example: 

gnmic -a <container-name/node-mgmt-address> --insecure \
-u clab -p clab@123 \
capabilities

Info

Default user credentials: clab:clab@123

Interfaces mapping#

vr-xrv container can have up to 90 interfaces and uses the following mapping rules:

  • eth0 - management interface connected to the containerlab management network
  • eth1 - first data interface, mapped to first data port of XRv line card
  • eth2+ - second and subsequent data interface

When containerlab launches vr-xrv node, it will assign IPv4/6 address to the eth0 interface. These addresses can be used to reach management plane of the router.

Data interfaces eth1+ needs to be configured with IP addressing manually using CLI/management protocols.

Features and options#

Node configuration#

vr-xrv nodes come up with a basic configuration where only the control plane and line cards are provisioned, as well as the clab user and management interfaces such as NETCONF, SNMP, gNMI.

Startup configuration#

It is possible to make XRv 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: vr-xrv
      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#

The following labs feature vr-xrv node:

Known issues and limitations#

  • LACP and BPDU packets are not propagated to/from vrnetlab based routers launched with containerlab.