Download Free Vmx Jinstall-Vmx-14.1R1.10-Domestic

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I’m excited to finally have the opportunity to play with Juniper’s vMX! Since it was announced last year I’ve been eagerly waiting for release – a couple of client projects already have passed by where the vMX would have been a perfect fit. vMX already won an award earlier this year at Interop Tokyo 2015!

In this post I’ll be giving a bit of background on the vMX architecture and licensing, and then go on to walk through a lab based configuration of vMX.

The vMX is a virtual MX Series Router that is optimized to run as software on x86 servers. Like other MX routers, it runs Junos, and Trio has been compiled for x86! Yes, that means the sophisticated L2, L2.5 and L3 forwarding features we are used to on the MX are present on the vMX.

Architecture

vMX can be installed on server hardware of your choice, so long as it is x86 based and running Linux (although I’m sure a version to run on vmware won’t be too far away).

vMX itself actually consists of two separate VMs – a virtual forwarding plane (VFP) running the vTrio, and a virtual control plane (VCP) running Junos.

The Linux virtualisation solution KVM is what Juniper are using to spin up the virtual instances of the control and forwarding planes, and multiple instances of vMX can be run on the same hardware. To see Juniper using Linux and KVM is no surprise as this is what we are used to on Juniper’s other products such as the QFX.

The VMs are managed by a simple orchestration script which is used to create, stop and start the vMX instances. A simple configuration file defines parameters such as memory and vCPUs to allocate to the VCP and VFP.

A couple of Linux bridges are created by the orchestration script. Clearly VCP and VFP need to be able to communicate directly so an “internal” bridge is automatically created for each vMX instance to enable this communication. An “external” bridge is also created, this is used to enable the management interface on the Linux Physical host to be used for the virtual management interfaces on the VCP and VFP.

For data interfaces, there are a couple of techniques available for packet I/O depending on the required vMX throughput –

  • Paravirtualisation using KVMs virtio drivers
  • PCI passthrough using single root I/O virtualisation (SR-IOV), enabling packets to bypass the hypervisor and therefore increase I/O.

Juniper recommend virtio or SR-IOV up to 3Gbps, and SR-IOV over 3Gbps (using a minimum of 2 x 10GE interfaces).

Which you will choose will ultimately depend on your use case for the vMX.

Licensing

Now this is what I really like about vMX! Licensing is based on a combination of throughput and features, and the lowest available throughput license is 100Mbps! Yes – you don’t need to be shifting multi-Gigabits of traffic to start with vMX. You can start small and pay-as-you-grow with vMX.

Below 1Gbps there are only 3 options – 100Mbps, 250Mbps and 500Mbps. Full scale features are included! List price on the 100Mbps option is a very reasonable $750.

At 1Gbps and above, licences are a combination of features (Base, Advance, and Premium) and full duplex throughput (1G, 5G, 10G, 40G)

  • Base – IP routing with 32,000 routes in the forwarding table. Basic Layer 2 functionality, Layer 2 bridging and switching.
  • Advance – Features in the BASE application package IP routing with routes up to platform scale in the forwarding table. IP and MPLS switching for unicast and multicast applications. Layer 2 features include Layer 2 VPN, VPLS, EVPN, and Layer 2 Circuit
    VXLAN.
  • Premium – Features in the BASE and ADVANCE application packages. Layer 3 VPN for IP and multicast

Setting up vMX on Ubuntu

Now I’m going to walk through setting up vMX on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server (Juniper’s recommended flavour of Linux for vMX). Just for fun this is actually running as a nested Vmware VM on my Macbook Pro – fine for a lab, but don’t try this in production! 🙂 I have allocated 8GB RAM, 4 vCPUs and two vNICs to the Ubuntu VM. Also the VM is enabled to support hypervisor applications within the VM.

At this point Ubuntu Server has been freshly installed, and the option to install virtualisation was selected during setup.

First things first, let’s update all packages, install the prerequsite packages and restart the system

Configuring vMX

As this is a lab based build, I will be using virtio for the virtual NIC. There are two options on the VFP – a “Lite” version PFE for labs and performance version for normal operation.

Note: Ubuntu 14.04 provides libvirt 1.2.2 which works for VFP lite version. However for the VFP performance version you must upgrade to libvirt 1.2.8.

Let’s extract the vMX application bundle and get going!

First of all we need to setup the vmx config file, this is done by editing config/vmx.conf

First of all I set an instance name for vmx, and set the correct vmx images. I’m using vPFE-lite.

Now the parameters the control plane and forwarding plane.

I’ve allocated 1 vCPU to vRE and 3 vCPU to vPFE. 1GB RAM to the RE and 6GB to the forwarding plane, as per the defaults for 14.1

UPDATE: Feb 2016
For vMX on 15.1, allocate 1 vCPU to vRE and 3 vCPU to vPFE. 2GB RAM to the RE and 8GB to the forwarding plane.

I have also tried vMX with 2GB allocated to the vPFE and the forwarding plane loaded, which could be fine for lab purposes. I’d expect 1GB to be the minimum on the vRE. 3 x vCPU seems to be the minimum for the vPFE.

Note that device-type is set to “virtio” for the interfaces.

I will only be using one interface in this lab, but up to 10 can be configured. For SR-IOV, things are done slightly differently – see this vMX doc for reference.

I now need to deploy the vMX instance using the orchestration script. “-lv” provides verbose logging. My vMX instance will be created by the script and automatically started.

Connecting to the console port on the VMs

We can now connect to the vMX control plane! This is done using the vmx.sh script again.

Specify vcp (control plane – Junos) or vcf (vPFE) and the instance name.

After a while, the FPC and interfaces will come online

I’ll go ahead and add an IP address to ge-0/0/0. Note: if I was using the management interface I could configure interface FXP0 also now. Remember FXP0 will be bridged to the host eth0 adapter (or an adapter you specify).

Can I ping anything?

OK, so I can ping the interface but nothing else on the host. As I’m using virtio I need to create a device binding between the host physical NIC and the vMX interface.

Creating a virtio binding

This is done in the config file config/vmx-junosdev.conf.

virtio bindings are flexible and can be used to map multiple vMX instances to the same physical host interface, or to connect vMX instances together.

A new Linux bridge will be created between host interface eth1 and ge-0/0/0 on vmx1.

If eth1 is not already up on the Linux host, bring it up

Again the orchestration script vmx.sh is used to create the device bindings

And we can see a new bridge has been created called “vmx_link” as referenced in the bindings configuration file

Now to retry that ping!

Success! At this point I’ve a working vMX with an interface mapped to a NIC on the Ubuntu host. What happens if I turn on OSPF and LDP?

Excellent, now the fun can really begin, but I’ll save that for another time!

vPFE

One last thing – what does the VFP look like?

The riot process is where all the magic happens!

Further reference

I hope you enjoyed this vMX post! For further reference on any of the above material please see the Juniper Release Notes for vMX