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Zero Touch Provisioning on the Cisco 8000 XR7 v1.0

September 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 Cisco 8000 series routers running XR7 in VXR interconnected to two Linux servers to demonstrate the zero touch provisioning capability of the Cisco IOS XR7 software.

The scope of this lab is to establish an understanding of the zero touch provisioning (ZTP) feature. This guide covers ZTP’s operational functionality, and all components needed to perform ZTP. It will provide in-depth knowledge of common DHCP options used in ZTP and how the HTTP and Syslog servers fit into the ZTP flow of operation.

Scenarios

  • Scenario 1. Accessing the VXR Environment
  • Scenario 2. Prepare the Linux Servers
  • Scenario 3. ZTP Fundamentals
  • Scenario 4. Understanding the Role of DHCP in ZTP
  • Scenario 5. Understanding the Role of the Python Script in ZTP
  • Scenario 6. ZTP Execution
  • Scenario 7. Verification of ZTP

Resources