Arista cEOS#

Arista cEOS is identified with ceos kind in the topology file. The ceos kind defines a supported feature set and a startup procedure of a ceos node.

cEOS nodes launched with containerlab comes up with

• their management interface eth0 configured with IPv4/6 addresses as assigned by docker
• hostname assigned to the node name
• gNMI, Netconf and eAPI services enabled
• admin user created with password admin

Managing ceos nodes#

Arista cEOS node launched with containerlab can be managed via the following interfaces:

docker exec -it <container-name/id> bash

docker exec -it <container-name/id> Cli

ssh root@<container-name> -p 830 -s netconf

gnmic -a <container-name/node-mgmt-address>:6030 --insecure \
-u admin -p admin \
capabilities

Interfaces mapping#

ceos container uses the following mapping for its linux interfaces:

• eth0 - management interface connected to the containerlab management network
• eth1 - first data interface

When containerlab launches ceos node, it will set IPv4/6 addresses as assigned by docker to the eth0 interface and ceos node will boot with that addresses configure. Data interfaces eth1+ need to be configured with IP addressing manually.

bash-4.2# ip address
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/24 scope host lo
    valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 ::1/128 scope host
    valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
<SNIP>
5877: eth0@if5878: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state UP group default
    link/ether 02:42:ac:14:14:02 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff link-netnsid 0
    inet 172.20.20.2/24 brd 172.20.20.255 scope global eth0
    valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 2001:172:20:20::2/80 scope global
    valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
    inet6 fe80::42:acff:fe14:1402/64 scope link
    valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

ceos>sh ip int br
                                                                            Address
Interface         IP Address           Status       Protocol           MTU    Owner
----------------- -------------------- ------------ -------------- ---------- -------
Management0       172.20.20.2/24       up           up                1500

ceos>sh ipv6 int br
Interface       Status        MTU       IPv6 Address                     Addr State    Addr Source
--------------- ------------ ---------- -------------------------------- ---------------- -----------
Ma0             up           1500       fe80::42:acff:fe14:1402/64       up            link local
                                        2001:172:20:20::2/80             up            config

Features and options#

Node configuration#

cEOS nodes have a dedicated config directory that is used to persist the configuration of the node. It is possible to launch nodes of ceos kind with a basic config or to provide a custom config file that will be used as a startup config instead.

Default node configuration#

When a node is defined without config statement present, containerlab will generate an empty config from this template and copy it to the config directory of the node.

# example of a topo file that does not define a custom config
# as a result, the config will be generated from a template
# and used by this node
name: ceos
topology:
  nodes:
    ceos:
      kind: ceos

The generated config will be saved by the path clab-<lab_name>/<node-name>/flash/startup-config. Using the example topology presented above, the exact path to the config will be clab-ceos/ceos/flash/startup-config.

cEOS Ma0 interface will be configured with a random MAC address with 00:1c:73 OUI part. Containerlab will also create a system_mac_address file in the node's lab directory with the value of a System MAC address. The System MAC address value is calculated as Ma0-MAC-addr + 1.

User defined config#

It is possible to make ceos nodes to boot up with a user-defined config instead of a built-in one. With a config property a user sets the path to the config file that will be mounted to a container and used as a startup config:

name: ceos_lab
topology:
  nodes:
    ceos:
      kind: ceos
      config: myconfig.conf

With such topology file containerlab is instructed to take a file myconfig.conf from the current working directory, copy it to the lab directory for that specific node under the /flash/startup-config name and mount that dir to the container. This will result in this config to act as a startup config for the node.

Saving configuration#

With containerlab save command it's possible to save running cEOS configuration into a file. The configuration will be saved by conf-saved.conf path in the relevant node directory.

Container configuration#

To start an Arista cEOS node containerlab uses the configuration instructions described in Arista Forums¹. The exact parameters are outlined below.

File mounts#

When a user starts a lab, containerlab creates a node directory for storing configuration artifacts. For ceos kind containerlab creates flash directory for each ceos node and mounts these folders by /mnt/flash paths.

❯ tree clab-srlceos01/ceos
clab-srlceos01/ceos
└── flash
    ├── AsuFastPktTransmit.log
    ├── debug
    │   └── proc
    │       └── modules
    ├── fastpkttx.backup
    ├── Fossil
    ├── kickstart-config
    ├── persist
    │   ├── local
    │   ├── messages
    │   ├── persistentRestartLog
    │   ├── secure
    │   └── sys
    ├── schedule
    │   └── tech-support
    │       └── ceos_tech-support_2021-01-14.0907.log.gz
    ├── SsuRestoreLegacy.log
    ├── SsuRestore.log
    ├── system_mac_address
    └── startup-config

9 directories, 11 files

Lab examples#

The following labs feature cEOS node:

• SR Linux and cEOS