Last week I described the new features added to netsim-tools release 0.4, including support for unnumbered interfaces and OSPF routing. Now let’s see how I used them to build a multi-vendor lab to test which platforms could be made to interoperate when running OSPF over unnumbered Ethernet interfaces.

First I needed to make P2P links within the lab unnumbered. Setting unnumbered attribute on the built-in p2p pool is good enough (for more details read the addressing tutorial):

addressing:
  p2p:
    unnumbered: true

I wanted to run OSPF on all devices in the lab:

module: [ ospf ]

I built Vagrant/libvirt boxes for four different platforms (Arista vEOS 4.25.0, Cisco IOS XE 16.06.01, Cisco Nexus 9000v NXOS 9.3(6), Juniper vSRX 3.0 Junos 20.3R1.8), so I needed four nodes in my lab network. As each node uses a different Vagrant box, I couldn’t use default device type:

nodes:
  c_nxos:
    device: nxos
  c_csr:
    device: csr
  a_eos:
    device: eos
  j_vsrx:
    device: vsrx

Finally, I created a full mesh of P2P links using the simplest possible link definition format (a list of strings in A-B format):

links:
- c_nxos-a_eos
- c_nxos-c_csr
- c_nxos-j_vsrx
- a_eos-j_vsrx
- a_eos-c_csr
- c_csr-j_vsrx

Notes:

• You did notice I didn’t have to define interfaces on individual nodes, right?

Next Steps

• Install netlab and a lab virtualization provider of your choice.
• Create Vagrant and Ansible configuration files, start the lab, and configure it with a single command: netlab up. Here’s the log file in case you’d like to see how it worked.
• Wait for the network devices to boot. Write this blog post while waiting for Nexus 9300v and vSRX to boot. At least the libvirt provider starts them in parallel (as opposed to virtualbox provider that starts them in sequence).
• Use netlab connect to connect to lab devices and inspect the results.
• Destroy the lab with netlab down.

Results

It works. The only glitch I encountered was the incorrect subnet mask in Arista EOS hello packets:

• OSPFv2 RFC (RFC 2328) specifies that the subnet mask in hello packets sent over unnumbered interfaces should be 0.0.0.0.
• Arista EOS 4.25.0 sends the subnet mask used by the interface supplying the IP address – 255.255.255.255.
• Cisco IOS and Nexus OS ignore the subnet mask and establish the adjacency.
• Junos rejects the incoming hello packets due to invalid subnet mask.

A quick search found an Arista EOS support article describing the interface unnumbered hello mask tx 0.0.0.0 configuration command that solved the problem. Mission accomplished. I also added that command to EOS OSPF configuration template, so you don’t have to worry about that when deploying your labs with netlab.

More to Explore

Directory with all relevant lab files including:

• Network topology
• Vagranfile (imagine copy-pasting it together manually)
• Configuration deployment log file
• Final device configurations

You might also want to watch the Using OSPF in Leaf-and-Spine Fabrics videos that inspired me to run this test.

Revision History

2022-08-27

netsim-tools has been renamed to netlab

2022-02-15

Updated the blog post to use new features from netsim-tools release 1.1.

2021-07-12

Updated the blog post to use the new netlab CLI.