This is the vrnetlab docker image for Cisco IOS XRv9k.
There are two flavours of virtual XR routers, XRv and XRv9k where the latter has a much more complete forwarding plane. This is for XRv9k if you have the non-9k see the 'xrv' directory instead.
I've not tested XRv9k with less than 4 cores and 8G of RAM.
Obtain the XRv9k release from Cisco. They generally ship an iso for a custom install as well as a pre-built qcow2 image. Some releases the pre-built qcow2 is quite large, so making your own from the iso is recommended. At some point we may support creating qcow2 from iso in vrnetlab, but that is currently not supported.
Put the .qcow2 file in this directory and run make docker-image and you
should be good to go. The resulting image is called vr-xrv9k. You can tag it
with something else if you want, like my-repo.example.com/vr-xrv and then
push it to your repo. The tag is the same as the version of the XRv9k image,
so if you have xrv9k-fullk9-x.vrr-6.2.1.qcow2 your final docker image will be
called vr-xrv9k:6.2.1
Please note that you will always need to specify version when starting your router as the "latest" tag is not added to any images since it has no meaning in this context.
It's been tested to boot and respond to SSH with:
- 6.1.3 (xrv9k-fullk9-x.vrr-6.1.3.qcow2)
- 6.2.1 (xrv9k-fullk9-x.vrr-6.2.1.qcow2)
- xrv9k-fullk9-x-6.4.2.qcow2 MD5:6958763192c7bb59a1b8049d377de1b4
docker run -d --privileged --name my-xrv-router vr-xrv9k
You can run the image with --privileged to make use of KVM's hardware
assisted virtualisation, without which CPU emulation will be used instead.
Although I haven't measured, I imagine --privileged results in a considerable
performance boost over emulation. Further, emulation mode hasn't been as
thoroughly tested.
It takes about 150 seconds for the virtual router to start and after this we can login over SSH / NETCONF with the specified credentials.
If you want to look at the startup process you can specify -i -t to docker
run and you'll get an interactive terminal, do note that docker will terminate
as soon as you close it though. Use -d for long running routers.
A: Cisco is probably better at giving a thorough answer to this question but essentially XRv is meant for low-throughput labs while XRv9k has a much higher performing forwarding plane that can be used for forwarding of production traffic.
A: Cisco specifies a maximum of 11 NICs but that seems to be balooney as it successfully starts with 226 NICs. Be aware though that the startup time scales linearly with the number of interfaces so unless you actually need a lot of interfaces it is better to start it with fewer. The default is set to 24 which felt like a good compromise and also means only a single PCI bus is needed, which just felt like a good thing.
A: Yes and no. XRv9k can run in a demo mode or a production mode, where the former is free and the latter cost money.
A: CVAC uses a virtual CD-ROM drive to feed an initial configuration into XR. Unfortuately it doesn't support generating crypto keys, which is required for SSH, and so it cannot replace the serial approach to 100% and therefore I opted to do everything over the serial interface.