Affect of configuration replacement on NX-OS, IOS-XE & IOS-XR

[Rod Oliver]

I'm looking into the use of Ansible and Napalm to do configuration management with IOS-XE, IOS-XR & NX-OS devices. One of the features of Napalm is to be able to manage the configuration as a whole and either do configuration merge or replace. I'm wondering what the impact on device forwarding when a full configuration replace when the only change in the configuration is something not related to forwarding, such as change of NTP server, or interface description. 

[marce1000]

 - Depends on how the configuration change is implemented; does it wipe out the previous configuration first; even for a very short period this could cause lots of trouble. Also in NX-OS issues can arise with templates which may no longer get assigned to ports on channels after the change. I would advise using products which can change the running-config were needed (ONLY).

M.