Platform Caveats

Cisco IOS

  • Cisco IOSv release 15.x does not support unnumbered interfaces. Use Cisco CSR 1000v.

  • Cisco CSR 1000v does not support interface MTU lower than 1500 bytes or IP MTU higher than 1500 bytes.

Cisco Nexus OS

  • Nexus OS release 9.3 runs in 6 GB of RAM (netlab system default).

  • Nexus OS release 10.1 requires 8 GB of RAM and will fail with a cryptic message claiming it’s running on unsupported hardware when it doesn’t have enough memory.

  • Nexus OS release 10.2 requires at least 10 GB of RAM and crashes when ran as an 8 GB VM.

  • To change the default amount of memory used by a nxos device, set the defaults.devices.nxos.memory parameter (in MB)

Cumulus Linux in ContainerLab

  • containerlab could run Cumulus Linux as a container or as a micro-VM with firecracker (default, requires KVM). To run Cumulus VX as a pure container, add runtime: docker parameter to node data.

  • Cumulus Linux ran as a container might report errors related to DHCP client during initial configuration, in which case you might have to disable apparmor for DHCP client to get it to run. The hammer-of-Thor command to fix this problem is sudo systemctl disable apparmor followed by a reboot, your sysadmin friends probably have a better suggestion.

  • netlab uses Cumulus VX containers created by Michael Kashin and downloaded from his Docker Hub account. Once Nvidia releases an official container image, change the container name with defaults.devices.cumulus.clab.image parameter (or by editing the topology-defaults.yml file included with netlab).

  • The Cumulus VX 4.4.0 Vagrant box for VirtualBox is broken. netlab is using Cumulus VX 4.3.0 with virtualbox virtualization provider.

Cumulus 5.0 with NVUE

You could configure Cumulus Linux 5.0 with configuration templates developed for Cumulus Linux 4.0 (use device type cumulus and specify desired device image), or with NVUE.

NVUE has several shortcomings that prevent netlab from configuring basic designs like IBGP on top of IGP. Don’t be surprised if the labs that work with cumulus device don’t work with cumulus_nvue device, and please create a GitHub issue whenever you find a glitch. We’d love to know (at least) what doesn’t work as expected.

To run Cumulus Linux 5.x with cumulus device type, add the following lines to your lab topology:

defaults.devices.cumulus.libvirt.image: CumulusCommunity/cumulus-vx:5.2.0
defaults.devices.cumulus.libvirt.memory: 2048

Alternatively, you could add the following lines to your ~/.topology-defaults.yml file:

devices.cumulus.libvirt.image: CumulusCommunity/cumulus-vx:5.2.0
devices.cumulus.libvirt.memory: 2048

Fortinet FortiOS

  • FortiOS VM images by default have a 15 day evaluation license. The VM has limited capabilities without a license file. It will work for 15 days from first boot, at which point you must install a license file or recreate the vagrant box completely from scratch.

  • Ansible automation of FortiOS requires the installation of the FortiOS Ansible Collection 2.1.3 or greater and a FortiOS version > 6.0.

FRR

  • Many FRR configuration templates are not idempotent – you cannot run netlab initial multiple times. Non-idempotent templates include VLAN and VRF configurations.

Generic Linux

Generic Linux device is a Linux VM running Ubuntu 20.04 or an Alpine/Python container. To use any other Linux distribution, add image attribute with the name of Vagrant box or Docker container to the node data1; the only requirements are working Python environment (to support Ansible playbooks used in netlab initial command) and the presence of ip command used in initial device configuration.

Host Routing

Generic Linux device is an IP host that does not support IP forwarding or IP routing protocols. It uses static routes set up as follows:

  • IPv4 default route points to Vagrant management interface (set by Vagrant/DHCP).

  • IPv6 default route points to whichever adjacent device is sending IPv6 Route Advertisement messages (default Linux behavior).

  • IPv4 static routes for all IPv4 address pools defined in lab topology point to the first neighbor on the first non-management interface.

Corollary: Linux devices SHOULD have a single P2P link to an adjacent network device. If you encounter problems using any other lab topology, please submit a Pull Request fixing it instead of complaining ;)

LLDP

  • LLDP on Generic Linux is started in Ubuntu VMs but not in Alpine containers.

Mikrotik RouterOS 6

  • In runs with the CHR image.

  • LLDP on Mikrotik CHR RouterOS is enabled on all the interfaces.

Mikrotik RouterOS 7

  • In runs with the CHR image.

  • LLDP on Mikrotik CHR RouterOS is enabled on all the interfaces.

  • At the time of the build, testing is being performed with releases 7.5 (claimed as stable) and 7.6beta8. On both of them:

    • MPLS dataplane seems to have issues when using virtio networking, while the LDP and VPNv4 control plane work fine. With e1000 everything works fine.

    • BGP-based route leaking is working on the control plane, but not on the dataplane.

Nokia SR Linux

  • Only supported on top of Containerlab

  • Requires the latest Ansible Galaxy collection ‘nokia.grpc’ and its dependencies to be installed, from the git repo:

ansible-galaxy collection install git+https://github.com/nokia/ansible-networking-collections.git#/grpc/
python3 -m pip install grpcio protobuf

Nokia SR OS

  • Only supported on top of Containerlab, using VRNetlab (VM running inside container)

  • Requires the latest Ansible Galaxy collection ‘nokia.grpc’ and its dependencies to be installed, from the git repo:

ansible-galaxy collection install git+https://github.com/nokia/ansible-networking-collections.git#/grpc/
python3 -m pip install grpcio protobuf

VyOS

netlab uses VyOS 1.4, which for now is a rolling release with daily builds (or custom builds).

This is because the stable release (1.3) lacks (or has limitations on) some of the nice features we are using such as MPLS, VRF/L3VPN, EVPN, …

The use of a rolling release means potentially any build is broken or with regressions, even if the VyOS team is smart enough to perform some automated smoke tests and load arbitrary configurations to ensure there are no errors during config migration and system bootup.

Additionally, using always the latest build published on Vagrant Hub, should allow to easily track and react to any configuration syntax change (which anyway is a very rare event). In any case, if you find a mis-alignment between the VyOS config and the netlab templates, feel free to Open an Issue or Submit a PR.

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You can also set the defaults.devices.linux.provider.image attribute to change the Vagrant box for all Linux hosts in your lab.