[AusNOG] Software Defined Routers

[Ben Babich]

"Software Defined" is becoming a well marketed term these days, though its
true meaning seems open to interpretation for many...

Yes, VyOS is merely a Debian based Linux distro with a bunch of config
management to wrangle the usual softwares (FRR, swan, dhcpd, lldpd etc)
into a complete product that a network generalist can easily use. The
restful API development is progressing well though ansible based
'management' has been around for a while now.

Hardware wise, surely the Linux based x86 platform that most of the big
name vendors have built their solutions around, albeit with fancy code to
shuffle the packets (DPDK/VPP/Fastpath etc) in massive volumes and quickly
could one day end up in the likes of the products like VyOS? The recent
addition to the pfSense family being TNSR, much like products from 4Wind,
seems to have a similar and somewhat successful approach. I guess one would
need to contemplate how the hyperscalers are doing it these days? ;-)

That said, it all gets down to the use-case and end customer really; you'll
have a pretty tough conversation convincing most to take the likes of
VyOS//TNSR/4Wind over the Cisco/Juniper/Arista etc equivalent when their
millions of dollars in revenue a day are dependant on it and they want a
TAC behind supporting it...



On Tue, 8 Oct 2019 at 15:35, Kosh Naranek <kosh at nervhq.com> wrote:

> VyOS is more or less just a router.
>
> I'm fairly certain the remote APIs are still coming soon, but it's been a
> while since I reconfigured one, the advantage is that it's basically an
> embedded OS that you can backup the JSON config and in an emergency just
> boot up a new one and upload the config file.
>
> While I'd prefer a hardware router, VyOS does the job, it's
> monkey-maintainable and you don't need to fill out the requisition forms
> and do the justification dance for a hardware router with redundancy.
>
> I'd personally put pfSense as more of a router distribution than an
> embedded router OS, but I haven't used it in way too long.
>
>
> On Sat, 5 Oct 2019 at 18:04, David Beveridge <dave at bevhost.com> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Oct 3, 2019 at 12:55 PM Rob Thomas <xrobau at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Also, VyOS can be managed by Ansible, which is surprisingly cool.
>>> https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/vyos_config_module.html
>>>
>>>
>> Actually pfsense can also be configured using ansible
>> https://github.com/bevhost/ansible-module-pfsense
>>
>> I've found pfsense very good for deploying HA Proxy load balancers with
>> FRR underneath.
>> The web interface can be configured for access to various functions by
>> LDAP user groups to manage the services on it.
>> can VyOS do this?  or it just a router?
>>
>> dave
>>
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