Explore network programmability with the DevNet XRd Sandbox

[ad_1] XRd is a containerized model of IOS-XR the place you'll be able to experiment with platform – unbiased options and deploy them to any on-premises or cloud infrastructure . offering all the advantages of utilizing containers in community operations.

XRd comes with all of the programmability facets from IOS-XR, together with Telemetry and YANG fashions, which make s it supreme for builders and community engineers .

The XRd sandbox gives a superb alternative to get began with XRd and discover community programmability.

XRd is available in two variants: XRd Management P lane and XRd vRouter. XRd C ontrol P lane is supreme for compute use circumstances like Digital Route Reflectors (vRR) or Path Compute Component (PCE) . vRouter is designed to ahead visitors effectively and also can deal with management airplane computations.

The XRd Sandbox makes use of the XRd C ontrol P lane , which is supreme for exploration and experimentation purpo ses.

XRd requires particular kernel settings on the host to work correctly. The sandbox is already configured with these settings .

There are a number of methods to deploy XRd , together with utilizing T erraform , H elm or P acker . Nevertheless, we used docker compose for the sandbox as a result of it's easy and straightforward to handle.

Topology <img class="size-large wp-image-466687 aligncenter" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/blogs-images-new/ciscoblogs/1/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-09-at-19.33.25-1024x635.png" alt="XRd topology" width="640" height="397" srcset="https://storage.googleapis.com/blogs-images-new/ciscoblogs/1/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-09-at-19.33.25-1024x635.png 1024w, https://storage.googleapis.com/blogs-images-new/ciscoblogs/1/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-09-at-19.33.25-300x186.png 300w, https://storage.googleapis.com/blogs-images-new/ciscoblogs/1/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-09-at-19.33.25-768x476.png 768w, https://storage.googleapis.com/blogs-images-new/ciscoblogs/1/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-09-at-19.33.25-1536x953.png 1536w, https://storage.googleapis.com/blogs-images-new/ciscoblogs/1/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-09-at-19.33.25-2048x1270.png 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px"/>

For this sandbox , we primarily based on the pattern segment-routing topology from the xrd -tools GitHub repository . We used a customized compose format known as XR-YAML , and the complete setup will probably be deploy ed in a single digital machine (VM) utilizing Docker Compose .

Modifications A f ew adjustments had been wanted to make the topology work. First, we updared the IP addressing for the administration community to match the out there assets in the sandbox.

Second, we used the macvlan D ocker driver so every XRd container ha d its personal IP tackle as a substitute of sharing the IP tackle with the host VM.

See the XRd Sandbox GitHub repository for particulars and to discover the config information used to create the sandbox .

Deploy The lab gives every thing you want ; you ’ll solely have to create the compose file that will probably be utilized by D ocker C ompose. This file is created utilizing the xr-compose script from xrd-tools.

Subsequent, replace the compose file (created by xr-compose) to level to the proper container interface that will probably be created by the macvlan driver.

<img loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-466700 alignnone" src="https://storage.googleapis.com/blogs-images-new/ciscoblogs/1/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-09-at-19.45.03.png" alt="XRd commands used in the sandbox" width="2990" height="754" srcset="https://storage.googleapis.com/blogs-images-new/ciscoblogs/1/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-09-at-19.45.03.png 2990w, https://storage.googleapis.com/blogs-images-new/ciscoblogs/1/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-09-at-19.45.03-300x76.png 300w, https://storage.googleapis.com/blogs-images-new/ciscoblogs/1/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-09-at-19.45.03-1024x258.png 1024w, https://storage.googleapis.com/blogs-images-new/ciscoblogs/1/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-09-at-19.45.03-768x194.png 768w, https://storage.googleapis.com/blogs-images-new/ciscoblogs/1/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-09-at-19.45.03-1536x387.png 1536w, https://storage.googleapis.com/blogs-images-new/ciscoblogs/1/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-09-at-19.45.03-2048x516.png 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 2990px) 100vw, 2990px"/> The sandbox directions embody the entire record of needed instructions .

To start out experimenting, search for the XR d sandbox on the Cisco san d field web page .

L aunch a reservation and comply with the directions . Use the instructions to create and begin the topology.

The XRd sandbox is ideal to get accustomed to XRd , the right way to work with it , and to play with native community protocols (e.g., ISIS , OSPF, BGP, MPLS, SR ) or to discover programmable use circumstances with YANG, NETCONF and GNMI.

When growing the sandbox, we ran right into a problem. We out of the blue misplaced the SSH connection to the VM when docker compose was creating the topology.

It turned out that the hyperlinks between XRd containers had been created utilizing docker bridge, which picked an IP phase utilized by the sandbox infrastructure, successfully blackholing the visitors. To repair it, we needed to configure a default tackle pool to make use of an unused IP phase.