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Cisco XRd and XRD-Tools

After struggling to instantiate an XRd control-plane container for a couple of days, I stumbled upon the ios-xr/xrd-tools github repository and it was very easy from there onwards.

Here is a summary of observations after using it for a few hours. I tested only the sample topologies provided with the ios-xr/xrd-tools repository

Observations:

  • XRd is IOS-XR, so no need to ellaborate
  • I can get used to the xr-compose script, with docker-compose.xr.yml for creating topologies
  • I wish the image already had a username/password set
    • I will try to customize the image and test the original topologies with it
    • Update: Another layer to the exisitng image did not work but if you simply update the startup-config file with the credentials, it works. Tested with the simple-bgp topology
    • Added the following creds, username: cisco, password: ciscoxrd, deployed the lab and the creds worked
username cisco
 group root-lr
 group cisco-support
 secret 10 $6$qtiDT/ivnLyw3T/.$JlOj2V4BOGwTJgVvl6AgodCcE6QBYHF6nyXF3ySQiEmKFti5/51Bq42Om5XVd1HuSoSr0F.illObQIzqwcrdR.
!
  • The docker attach --detach-keys=ctrl-\\ is good enough for me to attach and detach the containers
    • Thinking out loud, perhaps an ssh server in the custom image would work right out of the box on the mgmt ip, there wouldn't be any need for attach
    • Update: Likewise, simply add ssh server v2 in the startup-config file and ssh also works with the username/password saved above.
    • The ip addresses of the nodes can be found by inspecting the docket network for the mgmt bridge, defined in the docker-compose.yml file
lab@xrdlab:~/github/xrd-tools/samples/xr_compose_topos/simple-bgp$ sudo docker network inspect simple-bgp_mgmt | grep -i -E "name|ipv4"
        "Name": "simple-bgp_mgmt",
                "Name": "xr-2",
                "IPv4Address": "172.30.0.2/24",
                "Name": "xr-1",
                "IPv4Address": "172.30.0.3/24",
lab@xrdlab:~/github/xrd-tools/samples/xr_compose_topos/simple-bgp$

lab@xrdlab:~/github/xrd-tools/samples/xr_compose_topos/simple-bgp$ ssh -l cisco 172.30.0.3
(cisco@172.30.0.3) Password:
Last login: Sun Aug 21 00:20:58 2022 from 172.30.0.1



RP/0/RP0/CPU0:ios#exit
Connection to 172.30.0.3 closed.
lab@xrdlab:~/github/xrd-tools/samples/xr_compose_topos/simple-bgp$
  • XRD-Tools uses, only docker(docker-compose) data-plane infrastructure to deploy the topology, which is why there is a docker bridge network for each segment of the topology, which is different from another tool containerlab, which uses docker and base linux both, no complaints, just an observation
  • It would be a quick and easy way to test topologies, automated with netconf and grpc

This is just the beginning and it is a step in the right direction!