Cisco SD-WAN in netlab...

[sdargoeuves]

I've never touched SD-WAN, and wanted to get a hands-on experience. After seeing some great work done on the containerlab/vrnetlab, I've seen you can easily spin up the components to have a Cisco SD-WAN environment.

That was cool and easy, but that's not the full puzzle just yet. There is a lot of configuration required. Thankfully, someone from the Containerlab discord shared this Youtube playlist: Exploring SDWAN 20.15: A Student Driven Video Series

I'm currently working on my ugly baby: a overly complex python script, which configure all the pieces, because I want the lab to be fully operational at the end of netlab up && python crazy_script_to_configure_sdwan.py

I would like at some point, to bring this into netlab. I'm nowhere near ready to do this, but do you think it could make sense to have such thing, should this be done as a plugin?

Has anyone played with Cisco SD-WAN in netlab, or other vendors SD-WAN? Obviously, licenses are generally an issue, and for once, Cisco allows you to do the whole setup without licenses, you just need the images.

[ipspace]

Sounds like a really fun project, and yes, a plugin is the way to go. I might just go and do something similar for DMVPN just for the giggles ;)

[sdargoeuves]

It has been painful and it's far from perfect, but it works (most of the time 😆)

Here is the repo. I'm not sure about creating a plugin for this — the code needs a fair bit of tidying before it would be netlab-ready. I might move this to the back burner with the hundreds of other things waiting to be cooked, unless there's an appetite for it.

On a side note, I leaned quite a bit (understatement?) on vibe coding for this, and the lesson learned is... mixed, again! It definitely helped me move fast for some parts, but it also introduced complexity that made the code harder to manage. Interesting experiment, at least, and it works in our main virtual lab!

[ipspace]

It has been painful and it's far from perfect, but it works (most of the time 😆)

Works every time 60% of the time? 🤣

Here is the repo. I'm not sure about creating a plugin for this

How about we just point people to that repo if they want to play with Cisco SD-WAN? Would you be OK with that?

[sdargoeuves]

Works every time 60% of the time? 🤣

😆 Exactly how it was at an earlier stage of that project, hopefully it's a lot more now! But for that, I had to add a few sleep timers in a few different places, plus a potential reboot at some point to ensure things are correctly synchronised...

How about we just point people to that repo if they want to play with Cisco SD-WAN? Would you be OK with that?

Absolutely!