VLAB Overview
It's possible to run Hedgehog Fabric in a fully virtual environment using QEMU/KVM and SONiC Virtual Switch (VS). It's a great way to try out Fabric and learn about its look and feel, API, and capabilities. It's not suitable for any data plane or performance testing, or for production use.
In the VLAB all switches start as empty VMs with only the ONIE image on them, and they go through the whole discovery, boot and installation process like on real hardware.
HHFAB
The hhfab CLI provides a special command vlab to manage the virtual labs. It allows you to run sets of virtual
machines to simulate the Fabric infrastructure including control node, switches, test servers and it automatically runs
the installer to get Fabric up and running.
You can find more information about getting hhfab in the download section.
System Requirements
Currently, it's only tested on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, but should work on any Linux distribution with QEMU/KVM support and fairly up-to-date packages.
The following packages needs to be installed: qemu-kvm socat. Docker is also required, to login
into the OCI registry.
By default, the VLAB topology is Spine-Leaf with 2 spines, 2 MCLAG leaves and 1 non-MCLAG leaf. Optionally, you can
choose to run the default Collapsed Core topology using flag --fabric-mode collapsed-core (or -m collapsed-core)
which only consists of 2 switches.
You can calculate the system requirements based on the allocated resources to the VMs using the following table:
| Device | vCPU | RAM | Disk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Control Node | 6 | 6GB | 100GB |
| Test Server | 2 | 768MB | 10GB |
| Switch | 4 | 5GB | 50GB |
These numbers give approximately the following requirements for the default topologies:
- Spine-Leaf: 38 vCPUs, 36352 MB, 410 GB disk
- Collapsed Core: 22 vCPUs, 19456 MB, 240 GB disk
Usually, none of the VMs will reach 100% utilization of the allocated resources, but as a rule of thumb you should make sure that you have at least allocated RAM and disk space for all VMs.
NVMe SSD for VM disks is highly recommended.
Installing Prerequisites
To run VLAB, your system needs docker,qemu,kvm, and hhfab. On Ubuntu 22.04 LTS you can install all required packages using the following commands:
Docker
curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o install-docker.sh
sudo sh install-docker.sh
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
newgrp docker
Qemu/KVM
sudo apt install -y qemu-kvm swtpm-tools tpm2-tools socat
sudo usermod -aG kvm $USER
newgrp kvm
kvm-ok
Good output of the kvm-ok command should look like this:
Oras
For convenience Hedgehog provides a script to install oras:
Hhfab
Hedgehog maintains a utility to install and configure VLAB, called hhfab.
You need a GitHub access token to download hhfab, please submit a ticket using the Hedgehog Support Portal. Once in possession of the credentials, use the provided username and token to log into the GitHub container registry:
Once logged in, download and run the script:
Next steps
Created: December 22, 2023