A session in the DevNet Zone at Cisco Live, Berlin. Monitoring network equipment is hard, too many protocols each with their own tools for monitoring, MIBs always delivered as an afterthought, SNMP falls over at scale. We’ll introduce IOS-XR Telemetry, a push based fire hose of data, and our integration with ELK, a stack of open source tools for collecting all that data, indexing it, and turning it into graphs that are actionable.

1. Jose Palafox
February 2016
Developing Applications for
IOS-XR

2. jopalafo@cisco.com
@cruzfox
Business Development, Web OTT
Jose Palafox

3. akshshar@cisco.com
TME, Web OTT
Akshat Sharma

4. Agenda
• IOS-XR 6.0.0
• Why host an application
• Tools for developing your own
application

5. IOS XR: Architecture Overview
IOS XR
IOS-XR
IOS XR
QNX
QNX
Linux
Linux
IOS-XR LxC
Routing
Apps
System
Admin
Routing
Control Plane
SystemAdminLxC
IOS-XR LxC
SystemAdmin
LxC
NPUs
Containerized IOS-XR
RPLineCard
NPU
Admin Plane Separation from XR.
64 bit Linux Kernel for Scale and Performance
Linux Containers
64-bit IOS XR.

6. Application Hosting
• Minimal Wind River Linux 7
Distribution
• Applications may be co-located with
XR
• Custom LXCs for any application
• Can build Custom Apps using Cisco
Development tools
Router
IOS-XR
LXC
Linux Host OS
3rd
Party
App
App
LXC
3rd
Party
App

7. Why?
• Automation tools
• Puppet, Chef
• Monitoring tools
• Ganglia, Nagios
• Troubleshooting tools
• Iperf, Packet capture, Packet injection
• Other
• Consul, Git

8. Examples
• http://yum.puppetlabs.com/cisco-
wrlinux/7/
• https://forge.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs/
ciscopuppet
• https://github.com/privateip/ansible-
modules-core/tree/working/network/iosxr

9. What you need
• A way to build applications
• A way to integrate applications
• A way to test those interactions

10. Collocated or Container
Collocated
• Collocated with XR
• Simple
• Limited dependencies
Container Distro of choice
• Favorite distro
• Breadth of packages
• Resource allocation
• No file system or process
access

11. Native Builds
XR
• https://developer.cisco.com/site/ios-xr/
• Application Development Kit
• Wind River Linux Environment
• Extra Packages repository
NX
• https://opennxos.cisco.com/
• https://github.com/cisco/cisco-network-
node-utils

12. Integration Options
YANG
• https://github.com/YangMode
ls/yang/tree/master/vendor/ci
sco/xr
YANG Tooling
• https://github.com/robshakir/
pyangbind
• https://github.com/mbj4668/p
yang/

13. Test
XRv9000
• https://developer.cisco.com/site/ios-xr/
• Repackaging to Libvirt/virtualbox
images
Nexus 9kV
• get-n9kv@cisco.com
Workflow tool
Create image Import Image
Provision and
Test Topology
Storage
Xrv9000 ISO Vbox
Jobs
(in VCS)
Artifacts