NSO talking Netconf to XR ?

[previousqna]

Hi everyone, my membership to the mailer hasn’t completed yet so please unicast any replies…I’m hoping this is an easy question!

I’m trying to get NSO 4.3.1 to talk to some ASR9Ks running XR 6.2.1.18 via Netconf and not CLI.

First question – should this work?! I have enabled all the relevant parts of netconf in XR, and can talk to it with a direct SSH session.

I have downloaded and installed the 5.0.2 XR NED, but this is where my confusion begins…. When I define a device, the device-type options are “netconf” or “CLI”.

If I specify CLI, I can then specify the ned-id as cisco-ios-xr (but we don’t really want to use CLI if possible).

If I specify netconf, there is an optional sub-option for ned-id but I can only see options for “lsa-netconf”, “ncs:netconf” or “ned:netconf”, none of which would seem to relate to XR.

If I just specify “netconf” with no sub-options, when I attempt a sync-from I get the following result:

admin@ncs# devices sync-from
sync-result {
device 9K-381
result false
info Device 9K-381 does not have a Network Element Driver registered
}

What magic am I missing to get these things talking to each other?!

Many thanks for any assistance!

[previousqna]

Hi everyone, my membership to the mailer hasn’t completed yet so please unicast any replies…I’m hoping this is an easy question!

I’m trying to get NSO 4.3.1 to talk to some ASR9Ks running XR 6.2.1.18 via Netconf and not CLI.

First question – should this work?! I have enabled all the relevant parts of netconf in XR, and can talk to it with a direct SSH session.

Yes, many use cases will work with this approach. There are still a number of issues with the NETCONF implemnentations that are being sorted out, but as long as you don't hit any of them, it works. This is definitely the way to the future.

I have downloaded and installed the 5.0.2 XR NED, but this is where my confusion begins…. When I define a device, the device-type options are “netconf” or “CLI”.

That's the CLI NED. If you want to speak NETCONF to the XR, you can delete that package. It's irrelevant for what you want to do.

You need to get or build yourself a NETCONF NED. You can download the YANGs directly from the device and build inside NSO CLI using the Pioneer package (found in the NSO Package Library, NSOPL). Or you can compile the YANGs on the Linux command line, if you prefer. Unicast me if this sounds like climbing Mt Everest.

[bavice]

Hello Community,

Concerning the last answer,

You need to get or build yourself a NETCONF NED. You can download the YANGs directly from the device and build inside NSO CLI using the Pioneer package (found in the NSO Package Library, NSOPL). Or you can compile the YANGs on the Linux command line, if you prefer. Unicast me if this sounds like climbing Mt Everest.

Could someone help me to know how to build a NETCONF NED without the Pioneer Package?

Thanks from now for your answers,

[rogaglia]

hi,

1) Download in a folderYANG models for your XR version from here: https://github.com/YangModels/yang/tree/master/vendor/cisco

2) Issue: ncs-make-package --netconf-ned DIR package-name

     (where DIR is the folder where you dowloaded the YANG models)

3) Compile the new package: $cd package-name/src ; make

(check for any compilation error)

4) Copy new NED to your workspace packages folder

5) issue in NSO: $request package reload

Regards,

Roque

[bavice]

Hi Roque,

So thanks for your help and very sorry for my delay,

I've been working on it and finally i could get a right compilation i think. Sadly i should to erase some yang data models to get it without  compilation errors. The problem is that after that, i can read the new package in NSO, i can connect to my ASR9000 by netconf (i see the statistiques in my node) but when i want to synchronise the config to my NSO database i start to get errors. So i continue to erase some datamodels and recompilate my ned Driver and finally reload it, but i think that's not the right way.

Actually Netconf NED drivers are in production for CISCO Nodes? i mean are you working with them in production environments or just with the CLI NED?

So Thanks for your comments and help from now,

[Jan Lindblad]

To get the best results with NETCONF on XR, make sure you're running the latest XR code. If you're on 6.1.x, not much will work. 6.2.x is considerably better. 6.3.x is yet again a big leap forward. We (Cisco) have some customers that are successfully operating XR devices over NETCONF in production already with some 5.x releases, but that's only for quite small, limited use cases. The best way to find out if your use case works on a given XR release is to try it out. I can assist. And make sure to upgrade to latest code to improve your success rate. Then there's always the CLI NED option.