VMX with EVE-NG

Hi all,

Today i’ve been trying to setup a bit of a basic lab for jncip-sp exam prep and I was having a few issues  getting things running

First of all I used the VMX trial some details here – https://www.juniper.net/us/en/dm/free-vmx-trial/

There are plenty of dubious Youtube videos on how to install a 14.1 Version of VMX but this relies on downloading a file from a google drive and also obviously uses an old version. If you’re happy with that go back to google, if not follow along!

To start do a normal setup for eve-ng this guide was really helpful!- https://youtu.be/FDbgTlr-tnw

Once completed we then need to SCP over files to the eve-ng instance yet again I followed all of this guide https://www.eve-ng.net/index.php/documentation/howtos/howto-add-juniper-vmx-16-x-17-x/

What I did was I kept the naming from that guide consistent along with the folder names as well however looking back If I’ve understood correctly we can create folders with the following name scheme, when then adding the nodes in eve-ng we then get the option of the different versions

vmxvfp-[VERSION]

vmxvcp-[VERSION]

This was the bit that I was struggling with, as before I was just copying over files into a vmx folder and things weren’t working.

Also when copying across we need to copy in the metadata-usb-fpc0.img file and the vFPC.img file into the FP folder and I followed the naming scheme of the guide calling them virtioa.qcow2 (VFPC) and virtiob.qcow2 (FPC0.img)

Having said this though I’m still stuck on getting communication between the two devices… I’ll try to update this once I’ve figured this bit out!

[EDIT]

Seems like I had some transient issue somewhere???

To test fully I did the following:

  1. Setup 5 direct connections from MXFP1 to MXFP2
  2. On both MXCP1 and MXCP2 configure all GE interfaces to be part of LACP group ae1 and configure the relevant ae1 interface with ip
  3. Using show lacp interfaces we can confirm that the interfaces are working as they will have to exchange LACP messages to form the bundle, when they move into distributing state we know they are working
  4. Removed one interface on both sides from the lag (ge-0/0/0) and configured statically with a given ip
  5. Ping the remote IP (THIS PREVIOUSLY WASN’T WORKING) if this works we know everything is good

I suspect in my initial test either there was a transient issue or I might have used a conflicting IP as I went straight to step 4 above to test the device.

Hopefully the above helps anyone who might have had similar issues, if not it works as a log for me if I ever spin this all down or have to re-deploy it.

[FURTHER EDIT]

It seems like I was hitting some form of memory limit with the VFP’s, I connected a few more interfaces and tried to form a further LACP group which then only saw some interfaces coming up. narrowed it down to only the first 5 interfaces (ge-0/0/0-4) working, upping the RAM to 3Gb for each VFP seemed to do the job and now things are working.

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