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Great Lakes Ohio Valley Regional Newsletter

August 2022

"Arista's TAC is amazing. I was trying to figure something out late last night after being up for 20 hours. I almost gave up because my brain was fried.  I felt like I needed someone to point me in the right direction. It took 12 minutes total to make the call to Arista TAC, get a Tier 3 Engineer on Zoom with me and have a working fix. I am beyond impressed! 

With other OEM's TAC I would’ve been on hold for 30 minutes just trying to get someone. And they'd use up another 10 minutes checking for a serial number."

--Benny

Sr. Network Engineer

Ohio Valley Arista Customer

 

 

EANTC

Op Ed by Mitch Vaughan

Rubiks Cube JPEG

“We support that feature and have no issues interoperating with other vendor platforms,” reads the piece of marketing collateral published by a networking manufacturer. But short of going through a lengthy Proof of Concept process, which can be exponentially more difficult to coordinate when involving multi-vendor topologies, how can we validate that statement? It would be nice if there was a vendor neutral organization that hosted an annual event where networking manufacturers could back this statement up.

Enter the European Advanced Networking Test Center: the EANTC.

Every year, this vendor-neutral organization provides a big sandbox for networking manufacturers to connect into and prove two key things:

  • The features they claim to support actually work
  • They can play nice with others

The protocols and features being tested change from year to year, but the focus is primarily on what would traditionally be considered “Service or Hosting Provider'' technologies: the acronym soup of MPLS, VXLAN, EVPN, SR, SR-TE, VPWS, OISM, etc. However, with technologies such as EVPN/VXLAN making their way into enterprise designs, the testbed is more applicable to an enterprise audience today than ever before.

In late 2021, I was asked to participate as a member of the team representing Arista in the 2022 EANTC event. A chance to participate in what I’ve always viewed as the Network Olympics? Yes, please.

After accepting the invite, the preparation was immediately underway. One of my favorite quotes can be attributed to Louis Pasteur, “In the fields of observation, chance only favors the mind which is prepared,”, often summarized as “Chance favors the prepared mind.” The team adhered to this mindset and went straight to work choosing the platforms that would be used in the event and what software version would be installed on the platforms. We developed the configurations and tested the features prior to shipping the gear across the pond to Berlin where the event is hosted.

At the start of the event, each manufacturer’s team shows up to the Test Center to install and cable up all of their gear. The next two weeks are then spent testing, validating, breaking, testing, adjusting, validating, documenting and testing some more.

In short, the EANTC is an imposter's worst nightmare. A proving ground of sorts that at times can feel like a Rubik’s Cube of interoperability scenarios. A participant doesn’t receive a grade of “Pass” from the EANTC for a scenario simply because the control-plane looks correct; the data plane is also validated. This is done by opening the floodgates on a traffic generator and sending traffic at line rate into the test bed. Once that traffic generator reports zero drops, and the control-plane output looks as expected, then the OEM gets the coveted “Pass” for that scenario. Each participant is validated one at a time by the EANTC engineer/proctor, and the criteria for what counts as a “Pass” is dependent on the role of the participant in the test case. Sometimes a participant may just be a transit or “P” node, while other times a participant may be a VTEP/PE node providing services and connectivity to CE nodes.

When testing so many protocols, features, and scenarios, it’s of course just a matter of time before something doesn’t work as expected. Especially since some of the features being tested are on the bleeding edge.

One might think that when something inevitably doesn’t work as expected, the event would devolve into finger pointing and food fights. But, my experience was that the exact opposite is true. If any participant encountered issues during a test scenario, other participants jumped in offered to help troubleshoot and didn’t throw stones. I believe that part of this was due to the fact that everyone I had interacted with during the event was genuinely cool, but the other part was due to the fact that everyone there knew it was just a matter of time before their stuff broke or didn’t work as expected. Then they’d be the ones asking for help and/or more time.

One of my favorite parts of the event was working with all of the teams involved from different manufacturers. Some may expect that an event full of talented engineers from different network manufacturers would end up turning into a nerdier version of West Side Story in short order, but instead, a sense of comradery existed amongst the group, knowing that we were all there to geek out for a few weeks and prove that we could make all of this cool stuff work together.

We’ve all likely heard the term “you never want to be the smartest person in the room”. Well, this was certainly not an issue for me at this event, and I loved every minute of it. Some of the participants had their names all over IETF drafts and/or RFCs. During one of the tests, I was working through an issue related to EVPN/VXLAN Optimized Inter-Subnet Multicast (OISM) with an engineer from another manufacturer. As we worked through this issue together, I pulled up the draft and noticed his name plastered right there on the author section. The conversation went something like “Hey, it says here in the draft that….wait…you wrote this?” We ended up solving the issue, and we had some fun banter along the way.

After two weeks and hundreds of tests, data captured from all of the testing is summarized and the annual report is created. This report is published to the public and is a great resource for those looking for a means to validate that initial statement of, “We support that feature and have no issues interoperating with other vendor platforms.”

The report for the 2022 event, along with other goodies, can be found here: https://eantc.de/showcases/2022/mpls_sdn_interop.html 

Before too long we’ll be preparing for the 2023 EANTC event.  Here’s to the network olympics!

80392742_m

 

Upcoming Arista Events

Event/Topic Date Time
Campus vPOC - Layer 3 August 11th 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM EDT
(IN)NUG Event - Indi August 11th 4:00 PM - 7:00 PM EDT
ATD Cincinnati - Warped Wing or Hoppin Vines August 18th 11:30 AM - 3:30 PM EDT

Ohio Valley Summer Series Virtual Happy Hour - Session 3 (Cognitive Cloud Networking/Campus)

August 18th 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM EDT
     
(KY)NUG August 23rd 5:00 PM - 9:00 PM EDT
     
Arista Networks - 2+3 - Webinar Series - 1 August 26th 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM EDT
     
Virtual Arista Test Drive: Introduction to Arista Wired and Wireless Technology September 1st 12:00 PM - 3:30 PM EDT
     
Internet Edge - Design and Deploy Best Practices with Arista Networks September 7th 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT
     

 

 

 Software Updates

EOS

EOS-4.25.9M

EOS-4.22.8.3M

EOS-4.27.5M

TerminAttr-ReleaseNotes-v1.19.5.pdf

CloudVision

2022.1.0 Released

DMF

DMF 8.2 Released

 

Arista Comics

Ask your Account Manager for a Package of Our Special Arista Coffee

Coffee Comic 1_1

 

 

End of Sale/Support/Advisories

Security Advisory 0079

Security Advisory 0078

 

 

At any time you can check or subscribe to “Notices” here:

https://www.arista.com/en/support/advisories-notices

Product Highlight - 7280R3s

Hitching our wagon to Mitch’s Routing EANTC update, this month’s newsletter highlights the Arista 1RU and 2RU series of 7280R3s.

7280R3 line for Aug Newsletter

Built with features in mind, the Arista 7280R3 series has proven to be capable of deployment in a wide variety of use cases including Deep Buffer scenarios, Internet Edge for the Enterprise, Service Provider and Cloud. 

In addition to the software configuration solutions that these switches provide, they also come in a wide variety of form factors to fit 10/25GbE, 40/100GbE and 400GbE needs. For instance, the 7280CR3-96 provides 96 ports of 100GbE. Using breakout configurations, this switch is capable of delivering 192 ports of 25GbE in a 2 RU form factor. 

The popularity of 400GbE continues to take the data center and outside plant market by storm. Arista’s 7280R3 series provides several 400GbE options including platforms that support either QSFP DD (Double Density) or the OSFP 400GbE interface form factors. Leveraging these switches, a customer can prepare their data center for 400GbE links thereby driving down the oversubscription ratios.

In the field, we like to call these switches the tanks. The software configuration options are incredibly feature rich. Therefore supporting our craziest designs. And they provide Deep Buffers and VoQ (Virtual Output Queuing) for those ever-demanding HPC and IP Storage environments.

 

A note from the editors:  As always, we would welcome suggestions on featured topics or how to improve our content. Email: susan@arista.com or ckane@arista.com

Arista Networks - 5453 Great America Pkwy Santa Clara CA 95054 United States

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