TNSR Lab on EVE-NG

[danieltudares]

Has anyone been able to install the TNSR lab image on EVE-NG?
Care to share the installation procedure? Also, who's the performance on EVE?

[Galactica_Actual]

Hm, interesting! I haven't heard of anyone trying to install it on EVE-NG. Let us know how it goes.

[williwinkie]

@danieltudares
Hi I’ve got it working with EVE-NG. My main focus at the moment is testing/learning routing with VRF’s . I’ve not tried any performance testing at the moment. I used the CentOS template and added the following parameters:- machine type=pc,accel=kvm -cpu qemu64,+ssse3,+sse4.1,+sse4.2, -vga virtio -usbdevice tablet -boot order=cd

The only thing is, after the TNSR template installation is finished you’ve got to add the above parameters to the new TNSR VM to get it properly working. If you don’t the NICs don’t show on the dataplane - the underlying error is that sse4.2 is missing. Anyway it’s enough to get you up and running

[dennis_s]

@williwinkie Thanks for sharing!

[audian]

@williwinkie are you still running TNSR? Curious what kind of performance you were able to measure.

[dutchman]

@williwinkie
I know I'm responding to some really old stuff here, but I too was able to get it working with eve-ng.

1. Built a KVM with the ISO provided, built it with Ubuntu. I built it with 10 interfaces, 9 in bridge and 1 in NAT mode. The one in NAT I assigned an address so that it could run installation and update. After installation, powered off and all that.
2. Exported the qcow2 file to storage.
3. Eve-ng < downloaded linux images and followed instructions. This may not be necessary but I needed an ubuntu image on there anyway. I imported and extracted the 22.04 ubuntu image, because that's what I used to build the KVM.
4. Made a new folder in /op/unetlab/addons/qemu called "linux-ubuntu-22.04-tnsr". FYI the name DOES matter.
5. Imported the TNSR KVM into that directory, once done, renamed 'virtioa.qcow2'. This also matters.
6. The machine boots, it kinda sucks but I'm sure with some tweaking of the template or options it can be good. I used options: -machine type=pc,accel=kvm -vga std -usbdevice tablet -boot order=cd -cpu host which are default settings for the ubuntu template. You get a black screen for like 3-5 mins then the login prompt just appears.
7. Then things get fun. I initially just tried to set up a management interface on the dataplane and set up RESTCONF with that but I had limited success. Could ssh to it endlessly but 80 & 443 were bricks essentially. I could get to them maybe 10% of the time.
8. I then decided to set up a host interface instead. You have to run the below command to figure out what your interfaces are actually called on the backend because with my setup, you could connect e0-8, which is not what the interfaces are actually called.

conf
  host shell sudo -s
  lshw -class network -businfo

In my case, my e0 was actually ens3 with PCI ID of 0000:00:03.0. With that bit of information, I could then jump back into the TNSR cli and monkey around with settings.

host int ens3
 enable
 ip address [ip]/[cidr]
 exit

host route table default
 int ens3
  route 0.0.0.0/0
   via [dg]
   end config

conf copy run start

9. Initially I was unable to ping it or SSH to it, so I actually went into host shell again and just ping'd 8.8.8.8, which I believe kicked off the MAC learning process on upstream switches.
10. after doing that, I was able to ssh to it, and run RESTCONF after running this, which may vary based off of your settings.

conf
 dataplane dpdk dev 0000:00:04.0 network name e1
 dataplane dpdk dev 0000:00:05.0 network name e2
 dataplane dpdk dev 0000:00:06.0 network name e3         
 dataplane dpdk dev 0000:00:07.0 network name e4       
 dataplane dpdk dev 0000:00:08.0 network name e5         
 dataplane dpdk dev 0000:00:09.0 network name e6
 dataplane dpdk dev 0000:00:0a.0 network name e7
 dataplane dpdk dev 0000:00:0b.0 network name e8

 service dataplane restart

 pki gen
 restconf
  global auth user
  server host [host int IP] 443 true
  no server host 0.0.0.0 443
  exit
 service restconf restart
 write
 exit

This was my quick and dirty way to get a TNSR into EVE NG. I'm sure next round I could probably do better but it took a lot of trial and error to get this far.
Running Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS, with TNSR v23.11-3.

[dawizman]

@dutchman necro thread, but blows my mind that Netgate wouldn't have GNS3 & EVE-NG appliances ready to go. It would certainly make it easier to get professionals behind the wheel to evaluate and lab their environments.

[michmoor]

@dawizman agree on this

[fractal_boy]

thanks all for your input. GNS3 and EVE-NG images are on our radar. We are working on this.