Using Cisco IOS XR Containers

Cisco IOS XRd containers are shipped in two form factors:

• Cisco IOS XRd Control Plane – a set of processes running on top of the Linux kernel, using the Linux networking stack. netlab supports the XRd Control Plane directly, and we test the Cisco IOS XR configuration templates with it.

• Cisco IOS XRd vRouter – a combination of the control plane and high-performance DPDK dataplane. You can get XRd vRouter to work with netlab, but you have to change several node or device defaults.

In both cases, use device iosxr with clab provider.

Note

netlab cannot handle two widely different VM or container implementations of the same device. We could create a different device type for XRd vRouter, but since netlab supports the same functionality on both container variants, it’s easier to change the user settings.

Using Cisco IOS XRd Control Plane

• Get the XRd Control Plane container image

• Follow Cisco’s documentation to install it (host setup guide).

Using Cisco IOS XRd vRouter

containerlab runs the Cisco IOS XRd vRouter container inside a micro-VM built with the vrnetlab project. Follow the containerlab documentation to build that container.

By default, netlab uses GigabitEthernet0/0/0/N interface names with Cisco IOS XR. You have to use the igb NIC type on the XRd vRouter to get these interface names. Furthermore, containerlab uses Gi0-0-0-N interface names as link endpoints with the XRd Control Plane, but Gi0/0/0/N interface names with the XRd vRouter. Finally, XRd vRouter takes longer to start than the XRd Control Plane, so you have to adjust the “wait for SSH to become ready” timers.

You can change some of these settings with the container environment variables set via clab.env node- or device settings. You also have to change the container image, the containerlab interface name, the node kind, and the wait for SSH group variables.

Most of these settings can be changed for individual nodes, but the containerlab interface name cannot be. It’s thus best to change the topology defaults, either in the lab topology or in user defaults (where you’d omit the defaults prefix):

defaults.devices.iosxr:
  clab:
    group_vars:
      netlab_check_retries: 100
    image: vrnetlab/cisco_xrd-vrouter:26.2.1
    node:
      env:
        XRD_NIC_TYPE: igb
        CLAB_MGMT_VRF: management
      kind: cisco_xrd_vrouter
    interface:
      name: Gi0/0/0/{ifindex}