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bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#485663"><div style="font-size:
11pt;font-family: Calibri;">Haider,<br><br>With some effort, you can get
IXP Manager to interact with Arista or Cumulus switches. INEX does
this to the point that the effort required in making this work is less
than the effort required to maintain good quality manual configurations
on each of our switches.<br><br>What this means in practice is that it
takes a lot of effort to make automation work, but the benefit of this
automation can be worth the effort in some circumstances.<br><br>Given
some more effort, it would be possible to use IXP Manager data to
configure other switch types. If you're talking about a traditional
switch vendor with a traditional switch network operating system (NOS),
and where the switch vendor has good support for automation, then that
effort might not be very large. If the switch vendor doesn't provide
good support for automation (e.g. many traditional NOS's) or the
configuration mechanism is much more complicated (e.g. openflow), then
this may be a good deal more difficult or even impossible to do
properly.<br><br>In INEX's case, we also use vendor NOS's other than
Arista EOS and Cumulus Linux, but have made a conscious decision not to
automate these platforms because the effort required to make them work
properly will not return enough value to make it worth our while.<br><br>All
of this is the traditional engineering conundrum of balancing effort
and return.<br><br>IXP Manager exports the data required to configure
switches via vendor-neutral APIs. At INEX, we happen to use SaltStack
and NAPALM, but there is no reason you couldn't use another automation
stack which can consume either JSON or YAML. E.g. I'm sure Ansible
would work fine and Ansible is a very high quality automation tool, but
we happen to prefer SaltStack.<br><br>In general, our advice on
automation is that IXP Manager provides a baseline abstraction layer
which allows the operator to create their own tools to configure their
network devices. However before you set out to do anything, you will
need a very clear and detailed understanding about how all the
individual components work, along with a full overview of how IXPs work
in general, and several years experience of operating IXPs at an
architectural level. If you don't have all these things, then you are
likely to run into serious problems which will cause your attempts to
automate an IXP platform to fail. In other words, this is not something
that INEX can casually help out with a script here or there - this is
advanced level IXP operations and only a tiny handful of IXPs around
the world use automation in this way.<br><br>Nick<span></span><br><blockquote
type="cite"
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<a style="color:#485664
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Ali</a></div> <div
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right;"> <font color="#909AA4"><span style="padding-left:6px">19
August 2019 at 19:46</span></font></div> </div></div><div
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dir="ltr">Dear Nick,<br> I have seen your presentation
along with the video. I also have seen this below link:<br><a
href="https://github.com/inex/ixp-manager-provisioning"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://github.com/inex/ixp-manager-provisioning</a><br><br>So,
I need AristaOS or Cumulus to use above repository for automation. If I
am not wrong, then INEX is not currently providing support on the
switch automation. So, currently, INEX is providing an IXP manager which
needs operator to configure switch manually and put information on
portal manually too. Kindly correct me if I am wrong. <br><br>--------------------------------------------------<br><br>Also,
If I will use the same things as INEX is using, will I be able to
configure switch directly through IXP manager admin portal? <br>The
above link says that NAPALM and SaltStack should be learnt first. But,
after learning or become fluent with them, how will we link the whole
thing together and how will everything be connected to IXP manager
database and GUI of IXP manager? I have gathered the high level view of
how is the automation of switch designed? But if we want to deploy
automation to our switch then is there any support or scripts or
documentation that could help us ? So, summarizing, Are there any
scripts or documentation to get done with this automation so that we can
configure the switch through GUI of IXP manager and maintain
consistency?<br><br>Sincerely,<div>Haider Ali</div></div><br></div></blockquote><br></div></body></html>