Akshat Sharma

Akshat Sharma

ex-Cisco.


Helper Tools to get started with XRd

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XRd Helper Tools

In Part-1 of the XRd Tutorial Series, we learnt how to download and verify XRd images from software.cisco.com for both the form factors:

  1. XRd Control-Plane
  2. XRd vRouter

In this tutorial, let’s introduce a few helper tools that have been made available publicly to ease the process of testing and deploying XRd locally.

A set of scripts, samples and templates are published to Github here:

https://github.com/ios-xr/xrd-tools.

We will utilize these tools throughout the XRd Tutorials Series as we take our first steps with XRd.

Taking Stock of the XRd-Tools repository

Let’s clone the git repo:

cisco@xrdcisco:~$ git clone https://github.com/ios-xr/xrd-tools.git
Cloning into 'xrd-tools'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 69, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (69/69), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (43/43), done.
remote: Total 69 (delta 27), reused 61 (delta 24), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (69/69), 84.37 KiB | 2.01 MiB/s, done.
cisco@xrdcisco:~$ 
cisco@xrdcisco:~$

Dumping the file structure of the repository:

cisco@xrdcisco:~$ tree xrd-tools/
xrd-tools/
├── CHANGELOG.md
├── CONTRIBUTING.md
├── LICENSE
├── README.md
├── docs
│   └── version-compatibility.md
├── mypy.ini
├── pylintrc
├── pyproject.toml
├── requirements.txt
├── samples
│   └── xr_compose_topos
│       ├── bgp-ospf-triangle
│       │   ├── docker-compose.xr.yml
│       │   ├── topo-diagram.png
│       │   ├── xrd1_xrconf.cfg
│       │   ├── xrd2_xrconf.cfg
│       │   └── xrd3_xrconf.cfg
│       ├── segment-routing
│       │   ├── docker-compose.xr.yml
│       │   ├── xrd-1-startup.cfg
│       │   ├── xrd-2-startup.cfg
│       │   ├── xrd-3-startup.cfg
│       │   ├── xrd-4-startup.cfg
│       │   ├── xrd-5-startup.cfg
│       │   ├── xrd-6-startup.cfg
│       │   ├── xrd-7-startup.cfg
│       │   └── xrd-8-startup.cfg
│       └── simple-bgp
│           ├── docker-compose.xr.yml
│           ├── xrd-1_xrconf.cfg
│           └── xrd-2_xrconf.cfg
├── scripts
│   ├── apply-bugfixes
│   ├── host-check
│   ├── launch-xrd
│   └── xr-compose
├── templates
│   ├── docker-compose.template.xr.yml
│   └── launch-xrd-macvlan.template
└── tests
    ├── __init__.py
    ├── test_host_check.py
    └── utils.py

9 directories, 35 files
cisco@xrdcisco:~$

The scripts/ and samples/ directories are of particular interest to an end user as they help in setting up the host environment and abstracting out the various knobs required in docker-compose files to spin up working XRd environments.

System Dependencies

XRd is only able to run on Linux, therefore the scripts provided here are also targeting Linux.

The scripts are implemented in bash and python3, which must therefore be found on PATH. All active versions of python3 are supported.

The requirements.txt file can be used to install the entire set of dependencies required for basic xrd-tools scripts as well as for the py-test scripts to succeed.

However, to enable the use of the scripts in the scripts/ folder, we must ensure that docker-compose (v1) is available in PATH and the PyYAML python package is installed (e.g. in an active virtual environment).

Exploring the Scripts

We will utilize the following scripts and discuss their nuances in detail in subsequent parts of the XRd Tutorial Series.

At a high level, the scripts are described below:

  1. host-check - Check the host is set up correctly for running XRd containers.
  2. launch-xrd - Launch a single XRd container, or use –dry-run to see the args required.
  3. xr-compose - Launch a topology of XRd containers (wraps docker-compose).
  4. apply-bugfixes - Create a new XRd image with bugfixes installed on top of a base image.

Exploring the Samples folder

The samples/ folder contains sample docker-compose topologies that currently match the following scenarios:

  1. bgp-ospf-triangle: 3 Router (XRd) topology with OSPF and iBGP configurations.
  2. segment-routing: 10 node (2 Linux and 8 XRd) topology with SR-MPLS VPN configurations.
  3. simple-bgp: 2 node (2 XRd) topology with basic iBGP configuration.

We will try these samples out in subsequent tutorials once we get a hang of building our own docker-compose files. More such samples will be published to the repository in the future.

Exploring the Templates folder

The templates/ folder contains the following base templates:

  1. docker-compose.template.xr.yml: sample docker-compose abstraction template XRd with custom XRd specific settings. Such templates gets rendered into a traditional docker-compose file using the xr-compose script in scripts/.
  2. launch-xrd-macvlan.template: contains a set of example steps that form a template for how to run XRd using macvlan interfaces to enable external data and manageability connectivity. We will discuss macvlan interfaces and their usage with XRd networking in subsequent tutorials.

This was a brief introduction to the publicly available xrd-tools repository. This sets us up nicely to dive into the creation of a Host machine that can be used to run XRd Control-Plane and XRd vRouter images. Setting up the host environment to run XRd - up next!

Part-3 of the XRd tutorials Series here: Setting up the Host Environment to run XRd.

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