On Thursday, October 26th, 2023 I co-presented a talk at NetDevOps Days NYC along with Jerrod Gerth at Nokia. Blurb Test it first! Taking a DevOps approach to network labs. Abstract This joint talk from IP Fabric and Nokia will cover the “why” and “how” of building software-based network labs suitable for learning, testing, and validating changes. It will include discussion of: Theory: Why are network labs needed? A discussion of network simulation options and the use cases it can solve Real world: How to use Containerlab for network labs Presentation Presentation-as-code generated via marp and stored in GitLab: netdevops-days-2023-10

I needed to do some testing of Juniper Contrail API calls, and for that I could use some Juniper switches controlled by Contrail. As Juniper has recently launched a virtual vEX image, I figured I’d give it a go. Below are build instructions for creating a vagrant box for Juniper vEX. Tools Vagrant: Vagrant from Hashicorp. Vagrant is a tool for building and managing virtual machine environments in a single workflow.

I needed to replicate a Juniper SRX firewall to create and test a BGP config for a customer. I could have done this in GNS3/EVE-NG or some other virtual enviornment, but I find that Vagrant/Libvirt gives me the most usability when trying to reuse a setup over time, such as for automated testing. So with that goal in mind, I needed to create a vagrant box of Juniper’s vSRX firewall, but specifically for use with libvirt.

I needed to replicate a production Fortinet firewall environment to do some testing. I could have done this in GNS3/EVE-NG or some other virtual enviornment, but I find that Vagrant/Libvirt gives me the most usability when trying to reuse a setup over time, such as for automated testing. So with that goal in mind, I needed to create a vagrant box of Fortinet’s FortiVM firewall, but specifically for use with libvirt.