bookmark_bordervJunOS-Switch and virtual labs

At the end of 2022 vMX was announced to be End-of-Life. This was met with dissapointment from my end as it was/is one of the better virtual offerings to emulate a router and be relatively assured that bugs would be at a minimum due to it’s commercial support.

Just recently a new offering from Juniper appeared called vJunOS switch which is more in the vein of vEOS-lab in that it’s free but also requires no login to download (vEOS-lab requires a login to download).

vJunOS Switch is a great addition to my virtual home virtual lab and I’ll demonstrate how to stand it up (doing it my own way and not using the documentation of course!)

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bookmark_bordervMX and vEOS RFC 5549 interop, EVPN Layer-2 inter-op, etc.

I began this lab with the hopes of just showing some simple inter-op use cases but unfortunately so much time lapsed between my last blog post I kept having new ideas before I could publish. So this blog post has these subjects packed in for vMX and vEOS:

  • Explore a way to make interface creation less of a burden on KVM:
    • sub-ints (dot1q tagging) as a method to get around KVM interface creation
    • vlans as a method to get around KVM interface creation
  • An eBGP unnumbered setup for an underlay using RFC 5549 (interop b/t vEOS and vMX)
  • vMX and vEOS EVPN Layer-2 interop (type-2 routes)
  • vMX stitch from EVPN to Layer-3 VPN (vpnv4)

Let’s dive in.

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bookmark_borderArista and Juniper RSVP-TE InterOp

Arista has supported RSVP-TE for quite some time but has expanded it’s capabilities in recent years. Most notably their support for node-protection, soft preemption, and OSPF as the IGP (instead of IS-IS). Arista has also begun to release more Service-Provider features that make them an interesting choice when comparing the different vendors.

Because of all the above I wanted to test Arista’s implementation of RSVP-TE with Juniper’s implementation of RSVP-TE.

Here is the lab I am testing with:

Virtual Lab Inventory:

  • 2x vMX 21.1R1.11
  • 4x vEOS 4.27.1.1F
  • 2x Linux Hosts

The above will allow me vanilla L3VPN setup between two Juniper PE’s with vEOS acting as pure ‘P’ routers in transit. All configs are available on git-hub

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