Cisco Catalyst 8000V Vagrant box

A procedure for creating a Cisco Catalyst 8000V Vagrant box for the libvirt provider.

Prerequisites

• Git
• Python
• Ansible >= 2.7
• libvirt with client tools
• QEMU
• Expect
• Telnet
• Vagrant >= 2.2.19
• vagrant-libvirt

Steps

0. Verify the prerequisite tools are installed.

$ which git python ansible libvirtd virsh qemu-system-x86_64 expect telnet vagrant
$ vagrant plugin list
vagrant-libvirt (0.9.0, global)

1. Log in and download the Cisco Catalyst 8000V Edge Software software (Cupertino-17.8.1a or later) from your Cisco account. Save the file to your Downloads directory.

2. Copy (and rename) the disk image file to the /var/lib/libvirt/images directory.

$ sudo cp $HOME/Downloads/c8000v-universalk9_8G_serial.17.08.01a.qcow2 /var/lib/libvirt/images/cisco-cat8kv.qcow2

3. Modify the file ownership and permissions. Note the owner may differ between Linux distributions.

Ubuntu 18.04

$ sudo chown libvirt-qemu:kvm /var/lib/libvirt/images/cisco-cat8kv.qcow2
$ sudo chmod u+x /var/lib/libvirt/images/cisco-cat8kv.qcow2

Arch Linux

$ sudo chown nobody:kvm /var/lib/libvirt/images/cisco-cat8kv.qcow2
$ sudo chmod u+x /var/lib/libvirt/images/cisco-cat8kv.qcow2

4. Create the boxes directory.

$ mkdir -p $HOME/boxes

5. Start the vagrant-libvirt network (if not already started).

$ virsh -c qemu:///system net-list
$ virsh -c qemu:///system net-start vagrant-libvirt

6. Clone this GitHub repo and cd into the directory.

$ git clone https://github.com/mweisel/cisco-catalyst-8kv-vagrant-libvirt
$ cd cisco-catalyst-8kv-vagrant-libvirt

7. Run the Ansible playbook.

$ ansible-playbook main.yml

8. Copy (and rename) the Vagrant box artifact to the boxes directory.

$ cp cisco-cat8kv.box $HOME/boxes/cisco-cat8000v-17.08.01a.box

9. Copy the box metadata file to the boxes directory.

$ cp ./files/cisco-cat8000v.json $HOME/boxes/

10. Change the current working directory to boxes.

$ cd $HOME/boxes

11. Substitute the HOME placeholder string in the box metadata file.

$ awk '/url/{gsub(/^ */,"");print}' cisco-cat8000v.json
"url": "file://HOME/boxes/cisco-cat8000v-VER.box"

$ sed -i "s|HOME|${HOME}|" cisco-cat8000v.json

$ awk '/url/{gsub(/^ */,"");print}' cisco-cat8000v.json
"url": "file:///home/marc/boxes/cisco-cat8000v-VER.box"

12. Also, substitute the VER placeholder string with the Cisco IOS XE version you're using.

$ awk '/VER/{gsub(/^ */,"");print}' cisco-cat8000v.json
"version": "VER",
"url": "file:///home/marc/boxes/cisco-cat8000v-VER.box"

$ sed -i 's/VER/17.08.01a/g' cisco-cat8000v.json

$ awk '/\<version\>|url/{gsub(/^ */,"");print}' cisco-cat8000v.json
"version": "17.08.01a",
"url": "file:///home/marc/boxes/cisco-cat8000v-17.08.01a.box"

13. Add the Vagrant box to the local inventory.

$ vagrant box add --box-version 17.08.01a cisco-cat8000v.json

Debug

To view the telnet session output for the expect task:

$ tail -f ~/cat8kv-console.explog

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details