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Programmability on Cisco XR7 v1

August 2021

Winner of the 2012 Pioneer Award in Productivity, VXR is a simulation platform developed within Cisco to use virtual platforms for developing software. VXR combines the X86 based open source hypervisor KVM with custom system modeling technology to implement routers scaling from single board to multi-chassis. The term VXR (“Virtual XR”) comes from the first VXR systems which ran the IOS-XR operating system.

PyVXR allows you to build a topology of virtual devices which are spun up as virtual machines (VMs) on the VXR backend and virtually wired together. This lab environment is based on pyVXR and it is composed of two routers running XR7 in VXR interconnected to a Linux development server to explore some of the possibilities offered in XR7 related to network programmability.

The scope of this lab is to enable NETCONF, Telemetry, and a working development environment on Linux with several open-source tools. A basic understanding of XR and programmability is required to complete all the tasks. However, every step on these exercises is documented with detailed explanations to improve the end-user experience.

Scenarios

  • Scenario 1. Accessing Virtual VXR Environment
  • Scenario 2. XR7 NETCONF Configuration
  • Scenario 3. Onbox ZTP bash
  • Scenario 4. NETCONF Basic Operations
  • Scenario 5. Advanced NETCONF Explorer (ANX)
  • Scenario 6. XR7 Telemetry

Resources