A current customer test desired to see how well the AVI Load Balancer scales and as such they used Ixia BreakingPoint to determine the behavior. The point was to see when exactly the AVI Controller tells Openstack to spawn a new Instance of an AVI SE (Avi Load Balancer VM that holds a VIP and pool members reachable behind it) and how this process goes.

Following setups were tested:

• AVI LB VMs doing BGP (BGPaaS) with the Contrail vRouter and announcing VIPs
• AVI Controller being configured to spawn AVI SEs / LB VMs but using the inbuilt ECMP/AAP features of Contrail (yes, if you are asking yourselves, the VIP does not have to be from the same subnet as the AVI LB directly connected one to the vRouter)
• AVI LB VMs doing BGP Multihop with the SDN GW inside a VRF (this means that the SDN GW learns the prefixes and reuses the same LSP/label for transport/VPN as it already has for the directly connected IP of the AVI LB VM that originated the prefix)

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Sometimes it may happen that when you look in Contrail at the interfaces on a vRouter (on a Compute host) that some of them appear down. This you can also see on the Compute Node itself with vif –list. There can be some leftovers and this is the way to clean them up:

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Sometimes when playing in the Contrail GUI (eg. with EVPN-VXLAN settings via the Router object) you might trigger some problems with the objects in the internal contrail api database and then end up in an inconsistent state. This article aims at showing a simple way of cleaning that one up (in my case changing the VNI triggered a bug).

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Recently I had the chance to play in a lab with a Load Balancer manufacturer for the Cloud that I had no clue about before and which proved to be a challenging but also rewarding experience. I’m talking about AVI Load Balancer (www.avinetworks.com) and this article will walk you through the basic concepts of it, how to integrate it with Contrail, how to see what it does in Contrail and how it provisions the VIPs and also what potential tips&tricks and shortcomings might be.

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Someone asked me a few days ago if it would be possible to trigger Contrail operations via ansible. After a bit of looking around I did not locate anything already made so wanted to see for myself how doable this is. While keeping in mind that I never played with Python more than modifying a few things in scripts that I already found from others (I’m way better at reverse engineering and improving/changing what is already in place), I decided this would be a good challenge for starting things off.

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While searching for how to get started with Postman I found a lot of articles but nothing simple and strict to the point. As such here goes my attempt, with screenshots, at showing how a simple test looks. I will show case two simple operations:

• getting a Keystone Token from Openstack via V3 API
• using that Token and making a request to Contrail Controller to list the configured Virtual Networks

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If you’ve reached this article, then for sure you’ve been searching for how to get Contrail (or its counterpart Tungsten Fabric) to work with a Cisco ASR9K. One of the first links you most likely hit has been: Contrail MX ASR903 posted in 2014 where the Cisco case is referring to IOS XE, Cisco ASR 903, which most probably, if you came here, does NOT apply to you .

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