VPP/Progressive VPP Tutorial

Exercise: Setting up your environment

All of these exercises are designed to be performed on an Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) box.

If you have an Ubuntu 16.04 box on which you have sudo, you can feel free to use that.

If you do not, a Vagrantfile is provided to setup a basic Ubuntu 16.04 box for you

Vagrant Set up

Install Virtualbox

If you do not already have virtualbox on your laptop (or if it is not up to date), please download and install it:

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

Install Vagrant

If you do not already have Vagrant on your laptop (or if it is not up to date), please download it:

https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html

Create a Vagrant Directory

Create a directory on your laptop:

mkdir fdio-tutorial
cd fdio-tutorial/

Create a Vagrantfile containing:

# -*- mode: ruby -*-
# vi: set ft=ruby :

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|

  config.vm.box = "puppetlabs/ubuntu-16.04-64-nocm"
  config.vm.box_check_update = false

  vmcpu=(ENV['VPP_VAGRANT_VMCPU'] || 2)
  vmram=(ENV['VPP_VAGRANT_VMRAM'] || 4096)

  config.ssh.forward_agent = true

  config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
      vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--ioapic", "on"]
      vb.memory = "#{vmram}"
      vb.cpus = "#{vmcpu}"
      #support for the SSE4.x instruction is required in some versions of VB.
      vb.customize ["setextradata", :id, "VBoxInternal/CPUM/SSE4.1", "1"]
      vb.customize ["setextradata", :id, "VBoxInternal/CPUM/SSE4.2", "1"]
  end
end

Vagrant Up

Bring up your Vagrant VM:

vagrant up

ssh to Vagrant VM

vagrant ssh

Exercise: Install vpp

Skills to be learned

1. Learn how to install vpp binary packges using apt-get.

Note: This tutorial is using a special packaging of vpp called vpp_lite that allows you to run multiple vpp processes simultaneously. We will be building topologies of these vpp processes to allow us to perform labs which require multiple instances of 'routers' or 'switches'. Because of this, we will be getting our vpp packages from a slightly non-standard apt repository.

The installation mechanism is very similar to the standard Install VPP from Binary Packages instructions.

Add key for apt repo

curl -L https://packagecloud.io/fdio/tutorial/gpgkey | sudo apt-key add -

Add repo to apt sources.list.d

With your favorite text editor (and sudo), create a file:

/etc/apt/sources.list.d/fdio_tutorial.list

containing

deb https://packagecloud.io/fdio/tutorial/ubuntu/ xenial main
deb-src https://packagecloud.io/fdio/tutorial/ubuntu/ xenial main

apt-get install vpp

Run

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vpp

Exercise: vpp basics

Skills to be Learned

By the end of the exerise you should be able to:

1. Run a vpp instance in a mode which allows multiple vpp processes to run
2. Issue vpp commands from the unix shell
3. Run a vpp shell and issue it commands

vpp command learned in this exercise

1. show ver

Run vpp

vpp runs in userspace. In a production environment you will often run it with DPDK to connect to real NICs or vhost to connect to VMs. In those circumstances you usually run a single instance of vpp.

For purposes of this tutorial, it is going to be extremely useful to run multiple instances of vpp, and connect them to each other to form a topology. Fortunately, vpp supports this.

When running multiple vpp instances, each instance needs to have specified a 'name' or 'prefix'. In the example below, the 'name' or 'prefix' is "vpp1"

sudo vpp api-segment { prefix vpp1 }

Using vppctl to send commands to vpp

You can send vpp commands with a utility called

vppctl

.

When running vppctl against a named version of vpp, you will need to run:

sudo vppctl -p ${name} ${cmd}

So to run 'show ver' against the vpp instance named vpp1 you would run:

sudo vppctl -p vpp1 show ver

Output:

vpp v17.04-rc0~177-g006eb47 built by ubuntu on fdio-ubuntu1604-sevt at Mon Jan 30 18:30:12 UTC 2017

Using vppctl to start a vpp shell

You can also use vppctl to launch a vpp shell with which you can run multiple vpp commands interactively by running:

sudo vppctl -p ${name}

which will give you a command prompt.

Try doing show ver that way:

sudo vppctl -p vpp1
vpp1# show ver

Output:

vpp v17.04-rc0~177-g006eb47 built by ubuntu on fdio-ubuntu1604-sevt at Mon Jan 30 18:30:12 UTC 2017

vpp1#

Exercise: Create an Interface

Skills to be Learned

1. Create a veth interface that can be connected from the Linux Host to vpp
2. Create a vpp host-interface that will allow you to connect to one end of your veth interface via AF_PACKET
3. Add an ip address to your vpp interface
4. Verify using ping from host to vpp, and from vpp to host

vpp command learned in this exercise

1. create host-interface
2. set int state
3. set int ip address
4. show hardware
5. show int
6. show int addr

Create veth interfaces on host

In Linux, there is a type of interface call 'veth'. Think of a 'veth' interface as being an interface that has two ends to it (rather than one).

sudo ip link add name vpp1out type veth peer name vpp1host
sudo ip link set dev vpp1out up
sudo ip link set dev vpp1host up
sudo ip addr add 10.10.1.1/24 dev vpp1host
sudo ip addr show vpp1host

Create vpp host- interface

sudo vppctl -p vpp1 create host-interface name vpp1out
sudo vppctl -p vpp1 set int state host-vpp1out up
sudo vppctl -p vpp1 set int ip address host-vpp1out 10.10.1.2/24
sudo vppctl -p vpp1 show hardware
sudo vppctl -p vpp1 show int
sudo vppctl -p vpp1 show int addr

Ping from host to vpp and vpp to host

sudo vppctl -p vpp1 trace add af-packet-input 10
ping -c 1 10.10.1.2
sudo vppctl -p vpp1 show trace
sudo vppctl -p vpp1 clear  trace
sudo vppctl -p vpp1 show ip arp
sudo vppctl -p vpp1 show ip fib

Connecting two vpp instances

Running a second vpp instances

sudo vpp api-segment { prefix vpp2 }

Create veth interface on host to connect the two vpp instances

Using skills from the previous exercise, create a veth interface on the host with one end named vpp1vpp2 and the other named vpp2vpp1. Don't assign an ip address to either end on the host.

Create vpp host interfaces

Using skills from the previous exercise, create a host interface on vpp1 connected to vpp1vpp2. Assign it the address 10.10.2.1/30 Using skills from the previous exercise, create a host interface on vpp2 connected to vpp2vpp1. Assign it the address 10.10.2.2/30

Ping from vpp1 to vpp2

sudo vppctl -p vpp1 ping 10.10.2.2

sudo vppctl -p vpp2 ping 10.10.2.1

sudo vppctl -p vpp1 ping 10.10.2.3

Routing

Setup route host

sudo ip route add 10.10.2.0/24 via 10.10.1.2
ip route

Setup return route on vpp2

sudo vppctl -p vpp2 ip route add 10.10.1.0/24  via 10.10.2.1
sudo vppctl -p vpp2 show ip fib

Ping from host through vpp1 to vpp2

ping -c1 10.10.2.2

Ping from vpp2 through vpp1 to host

sudo vppctl -p vpp2 ping 10.10.1.1

Switching

Cleanup previous exercises

Note: You will lose all your existing config in your vpp instances!

ps -ef | grep vpp | awk '{print $2}'| xargs sudo kill
sudo ip link del dev vpp1host
sudo ip link del dev vpp1vpp2