SONiC network operating system for Nexus 9K switches

[richawil]

I have seen announcements for support of the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) for use with the SONiC network operating system on some models of the Nexus switches:

Last year, we announced new portability options for data center networking software and hardware by disaggregating the Network Operating System (NX-OS) from our hardware (Nexus). In doing this, Cisco made available the Switch Abstraction Interfac (SAI), a standard-based ASIC API that allows Nexus 9000 switches with Cloud Scale technology to interact with third-party operating systems (OS).

SAI has been available for select customers on Nexus 9000 100G and 40G top of rack switches (Nexus 9232C, Nexus 92304 and Nexus 9364C ). Recently, Cisco announced a new Nexus 9336C 100G leaf switch that delivers crucial software and hardware features for modern cloud infrastructure, including support for SAI.

But I can find nothing about how to install or utilize the SAI.  Is it part of the NX-OS and just included along side?  And how do I run the SONiC OS instead of NX-OS?

[pieterh]

>>> SAI has been available for select customers  <<<

>>> Microsoft and other web-scale customers are now running their Sonic operating system on these Nexus 9200/9300 platforms. As Yousef Khalidi, CVP of Microsoft Azure Networking noted:

<<<

i see a recent post: Cisco Supports SONiC on 8000 Series Routers,
so you are right they made some progress since 2018.

=> guess you need to contact Microsoft for the Sonic OS.

acoording to this summit hardware was also shipped in 2018

Sonic may be retreived from github ?

[richawil · Accepted solution]

Contact Cisco support  for the Nexus switches.  They will be able to tell you the location of the image to download.  

Steps to convert switch running NXOS to SONIC.

1. copy sonic nbi image to bootflash:
2. Bring switch into loader prompt.
3. at loader>  boot <image copied in #1 >
4. on Prompt :n3000 login - login as root without password (sometime this steps hangs, try changing the baud rate of console) 
5. /usr/local/install/self_install_on_disk.sh
6. mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/data/
7. reboot
8. After #7, switch will come up with SONIC. Default credentials will be admin/admin.