Data Center testing

Wed Aug 26 20:04:26 UTC 2009

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 12:53:10PM +0000, Jeff Aitken wrote:
> you have to have some way of describing the desired state of the network in
> machine-parsable format

Any suggested tools for describing the desired state of the network?

NDL, the only option I'm familiar with, is just a brute-force approach
to describing routers in XML.  This is hardly better than a
router-config, and the visualizations break down on any graph with
more than a few nodes or edges.  I'd need thousands to describe
customer routers.

Or do we just give up on describing all of those customer-facing
interfaces, and only manage descriptions for the service-provider part
of the network?  This seems to be what people actually do with network
descriptions (oversimplify), and that doesn't seem like much of a
description to me.

Is there a practical middle-ground between dismissing a multitude of
relevant customer configuration and the data overload created by
merely replicating the entire network config in a new language?

Ross

-- 
Ross Vandegrift
ross at kallisti.us

"If the fight gets hot, the songs get hotter.  If the going gets tough,
the songs get tougher."
	--Woody Guthrie