802.1X is an IEEE standard protocol that prevents unauthorized devices from gaining access to the network.

Automatic certificate management provides support for retrieving signed x509v3 certificates from a server under the Enrollment over Secure Transport (EST) protocol, described in RFC 7030. The feature provides only EST client capabilities.

EOS 4.21.3F introduces support for BGP Flowspec, as defined in RFC5575 and RFC7674. The typical use case is to filter or redirect DDoS traffic on edge routers.

Peer Tagging Route Filtering feature discards BGP route advertisements by the peers which the routes are received from. The feature lets users assign a peer-tag to a peer or a group of peers in inbound direction and discard routes advertisements by the peer-tag in outbound direction. One use case of the feature is to discard AS loop routes in outbound direction in data center deployments.

BGP TOI EOS 4.34.0F

This feature allows failover to the backup path to occur in constant time per interface going down for features such as RSVP link protection, RSVP node protection, TI-LFA link protection, and BGP PIC. Without this feature enabled, it would take time proportional to the number of paths going over the interface experiencing the link down event to failover to the backup path. With this feature enabled, the failover time would be constant regardless of the number of paths.

This feature implements the ability to configure any tx serdes parameters via the CLI. This is useful to work around any L1 issues that customers may encounter due to suboptimal networks/links/transceivers.

TOI EOS 4.34.0F

Cluster Load Balancing is a feature designed to ensure optimal load balancing of flows used as part of GPU based cluster communication. When this feature is enabled, a TOR router monitors RoCE traffic flowing between the GPU servers and spine uplinks and ensures optimal load balancing in the network.

Common Management Interface Specification (CMIS) defines, starting with revision 4.0, a standard mechanism for managing the firmware of compliant transceivers. This mechanism allows for transceivers’ firmware to be updated without having to remove the transceiver from the switch. Firmware updates may be necessary in a testing or production environment to resolve potential firmware bugs. Some transceivers may also support firmware management operations in a hitless manner (without impacting traffic).

This feature supports an alternative L3 EVPN gateway mechanism using multi-domain L3 VRF instead. A multi-domain IP VRF allows configuring not only the local domain route distinguisher (RD) and route targets (RT), but also the remote domain route distinguisher and route targets on a DCI gateway.

TOI EVPN EOS 4.34.0F DCI Multi-Domain

Arista’s DCS-7130LBR series of switches are powerful network devices designed for ultra latency applications along with a wealth of networking features.

This feature allows generating the syslog message for the packets matching rules in egress ACLs. This can be enabled using the log keyword when configuring an ACL rule. A copy of the packet matching such an ACL rule is sent to the control plane, where a syslog entry for the packet header is generated.

As Ethernet technologies made their way into the Metropolitan Area Networks (MAN) and the Wide Area Networks (WAN) from the conventional enterprise level usage, they are now widely being used by service providers to provide end-to-end connectivity to customers. Such service provider networks are typically spread across large geographical areas. Additionally, the service providers themselves may be relying on certain internet backbone providers, referred to as “operators”, to provide connectivity in case the geographical area to be covered is too huge. This mode of operation makes the task of Operations, Administration and Maintenance (OAM) of such networks far more challenging, and the ability of service providers to respond to frame loss in such networks directly impacts their competitiveness.

This feature adds support for using the management port on AWE-7220RP-5TH-2S alternately as Ethernet8 port.

TOI EOS 4.34.0F

This feature adds the ability for an L3 default gateway TEP in a Centralized Gateway topology to advertise its SVI virtual IP addresses to VARP MAC bindings and primary addresses to System MAC bindings using EVPN type-2 routes for EVPN VXLAN overlays. Two new commands, redistribute router-mac virtual-ip[next-hop vtep primary] and redistribute router-mac system ip are introduced to enable the redistributions. This would help the L2 TEP on the network to learn the default gateway IP without flooding an ARP request for the gateway IP. This feature is only intended for Centralized Gateway Topologies.

The agent DmaQueueMonitor provides visibility into packets coming up to the CPU via CPU queues. Packets are continuously sampled on monitored queues and kept available for reporting when a CPU congestion event occurs. When a queue that leads to CPU processing is congested a PCAP file may be created from the sampled packets that were captured from before and after the congestion event.  The PCAP file is written to the file system for off-line examination.

 

This feature enables IPv6 access control list (ACLs) on cloudEOS and Caravan devices, providing access control on incoming traffic (ingress direction). ACLs use packet classification to mark certain packets going through the packet processor pipeline and then take configured action against them. Rules are defined based on various fields of packets.

This feature provides an IPv6 address provisioning mechanism which is driven by tenant authentication results and offers inter-tenant traffic isolation. The generated IPv6 connected route subnets can also be summarized into aggregate routes dynamically for advertising out to BGP peers.

This solution allows delivery of both IPv4 and IPv6 multicast traffic in an IP-VRF using an IPv6 multicast in the underlay network. The protocol used to build multicast trees in the underlay network is IPv6 PIM-SSM.

IS-IS flexible algorithm (FlexAlgo) provides a lightweight, simplified mechanism for performing basic traffic engineering functions within a single IS-IS area. FlexAlgo requires the cooperation of all nodes within the IS-IS area but does not require an external controller. Paths are computed by each node within the area, resulting in an MPLS switched forwarding path to nodes that are advertising a node Segment Identifier (SID) for the algorithm. The results of the path computation are placed in the colored tunnel RIB or system tunnel RIB, which simplifies route resolution.

Segment Routing provides mechanism to define end-to-end paths within a topology by encoding paths as sequences of sub-paths or instructions. These sub-paths or instructions are referred to as “segments”. IS-IS Segment Routing (henceforth referred to as IS-IS SR) provides means to advertise such segments through IS-IS protocol.

At a high level, L1 profiles are a set of configurations which allow EOS users to change the numbering scheme and default L1 configurations of all front panel interfaces across their network switch. On Arista network switches, front panel transceiver cages are exposed as ports which are numbered sequentially: 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. These identifiers are usually marked on the front panel to allow for easier identification.

This feature implements RFC 3478. It allows devices to preserve the MPLS LDP LFIB entries in the forwarding plane if the TCP connection is lost or LDP agent restarts.

The LDP pseudowire feature provides support for emulating Ethernet connections over a Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) network using the extension of the MPLS Label Distribution Protocol (LDP)

At a transit router when multiple LSP are available for a given destination from different protocols EOS does stitching based on hard coded preferences. LFIB stitching preferences give a provision to stitch together different LSPs based on configurable preferences. For each protocol(destination) preference can be configured for a given source protocol.

TOI MPLS Tunnel LFIB EOS 4.34.0F

This TOI introduces a new global CLI configuration command to transition CMIS compliant transceivers to the low-power mode when all interfaces associated with the transceiver are shut down. Conversely, the transceivers will transition into high power mode when any interface associated with the transceiver is enabled.

TOI EOS 4.34.0F

This feature allows classification of packets on QoS policy-maps based on the Class of Service (CoS), VLAN, Drop Eligible Indicator (DEI) in the 802.1q header of the packet. CoS (Class of Service) corresponds to the Priority code point (PCP) bits in the 802.1q header.

MLAG Smart System Upgrade (SSU) provides the ability to upgrade the EOS image of an MLAG switch with minimal traffic disruption.

TOI EOS 4.20.5F EOS 4.34.0F

Nexthop Group backup-activation events are produced by forwarding agents. Nexthop Groups supports configuring the backup paths through EOS RPC APIs and CLI. Whenever the route or prefix starts pointing to configured backup paths, a backup-activation event will be logged into the event-monitor DB with nexthop-group name, accurate timestamp and other attributes. The event monitoring feature also supports filtering the events based on the nexthop-group name, version etc.

Policy-map counters can be configured to display per-interface counters for all class-maps attached to all successfully programmed policy-maps. The feature is not enabled by default and has to be configured through the command line interface. When enabled, the output of the show command will display both per-interface and aggregate counters.

TOI EOS 4.34.0F

Priority Flow Control (PFC) Watchdog feature monitors interfaces for priority-flow-control Pause storm. If such a storm is detected on no-drop enabled priorities, it takes actions such as:

Introduced in the 4.34.0F release, the maximum links feature allows users to specify the number of active members in both LACP and static port-channels. If active members become inactive due to configuration changes or link failure, previously restricted members can become active. This ensures the port-channel remains operational, preventing disruptions even if all initial active members fail.

Power management is a way to limit the total available power to be used for Power over Ethernet (PoE) ports. Without power management, the total amount of power that the power supply units (PSU) are able to provide is used. Power management can be used to create power redundancies. For example, if a system has 2 1050W PSUs, the feature can set the total available power to be 800W for PoE. With this configuration, 1 PSU is sufficient to power the system and the unused PSU acts as a backup source, thus giving the system a 1+1 redundancy.

RADIUS proxy feature enables proxying RADIUS requests from a RADIUS client and forwarding it to a remote RADIUS server. Similarly, RADIUS proxy receives the reply from the remote RADIUS server and forwards it to the client.

RSVP-TE, the Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) for Traffic Engineering (TE), is used to distribute MPLS labels for steering traffic and reserving bandwidth. The Label Edge Router (LER) feature implements the headend functionality, i.e., RSVP-TE tunnels can originate at an LER which can steer traffic into the tunnel.

RSVP-TE P2MP LER adds ingress and egress support for Point-to-Multipoint (P2MP) LSPs to be used in Multicast Virtual Private Network (MVPN) as an extension to the LSR support which adds transit support.

The sFlow EVPN MPLS extension adds support for providing information related to the bridging domain in sFlow packet samples, for traffic forwarded through L2 EVPN MPLS.

Sflow TOI EVPN MPLS EOS 4.34.0F

This feature allows users to configure SNMP’s context to provide a value from a default context when no such value is provided in the context queried.

This feature aims to solve two problems:

TOI EOS 4.34.0F

Dot1q (802.1Q) is a tunneling protocol that encapsulates traffic from multiple customer (c-tag) VLANs in an additional single outer service provider (s-tag) VLAN for transit across a larger network structure that includes traffic from all customers. Tunneling eliminates the service provider requirement that every VLAN be configured from multiple customers, avoiding overlapping address space issues.

The packet path, prerequisites, and restrictions listed in this document apply to this feature as well Dynamic Twice NAT is a variant of the dynamic NAT feature where both the source and destination IP can be modified while forwarding a packet. One of the IP addresses will be dynamically assigned, while the other will be statically assigned.

In the realm of network service level agreements (SLAs), a customer often commits to a certain level of service for their clients. This may necessitate limiting bandwidth at the Layer 3 sub-interface level. Currently, egress service policies can achieve bandwidth control, but ingress control lacks a similar mechanism.

TOI EOS 4.34.0F

Linear pluggable optics (LPO) represent a significant advancement in transceiver technology. These modules are designed to reduce costs, power consumption, and latency compared to traditional Digital Signal Processing (DSP) based transceivers.

The Linux audit system provides the ability to record security events on the switch. Audit rules must be configured and enabled at the CLI. Audit rules can be configured in different groups to assist with organization and maintenance.

Security TOI EOS 4.34.0F Audit

The Lowest Load feature uses load as a key metric for selecting the best path. When this metric is prioritized, routers will choose the path with the lowest load as the best option.

TOI AVT Pathfinder EOS 4.34.0F

Leaf Smart System Upgrade (SSU) provides the ability to upgrade the EOS image with minimal traffic disruption. To perform the SSU, Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) should either be configured as MSTP or Rapid-PVST mode or should be disabled. Meanwhile, all ports should be configured with admin edge ports (i.e., all ports are supposed to connect to host only) and the BPDU guard should be enabled for all edge ports.

Access Control Lists (ACL) use packet classification to mark certain packets going through the packet processor pipeline and then take configured action against them. Rules are defined based on various fields of packets and usually TCAM is used to match packets to rules. For example, there can be a rule to match the packet source IP address against a list of IP addresses, and drop the packet if there is a match. This will be expressed in TCAM with multiple entries matching the list of IP addresses. Number of entries is reduced by masking off bits, if possible. TCAM is a limited resource, so with classifiers having a large number of rules and a big field list, TCAM runs out of resources.

This feature is only applicable to shaped port-channel subinterfaces. Traffic destined to a shaped port-channel subinterface would be load-balanced across all members of the port-channel. Shaping configured on the port-channel subinterface will be directly used across all the members of port-channel. Load-balancing criterion for flows destined to a shaped port-channel subinterface is the same as parent port-channel load-balancing criterion. Each shaped port-channel subinterface consumes as many SPPID (System physical port identifier) as the number of members added to the port-channel along with one extra port-channel resource (LAG ID) to combine all these SPPID. Anchor based approach is default behavior and we explicitly need to enable and reload the system for this feature to work.

  

SwitchApp is an FPGA-based feature available on Arista’s 713x-Series platforms. It performs ultra low latency Ethernet packet switching. Its packet switching feature set, port count, and port to port latency are a function of the selected SwitchApp profile. Detailed latency measurements are available in the userguide on the Arista Support site.

Before release 4.34.0F traffic in Port Mode PW was always classified based on COS-To-TC global map irrespective of trust mode. This feature allows users to classify traffic in accordance with trust mode, default CoS and default DSCP of the interface.

TOI EOS 4.34.0F

This feature introduces a slot level CLI command for SFP transceivers. When configured, EOS will only manage the transceiver via the low speed hardware pins. The command is intended to be used in situations where SMBUS communication to access transceiver EEPROM is not reliable, which would normally lead to EOS disabling the port. Enabling this feature ignores any EEPROM dependent functionality and only turns on the laser, which may allow the link to come up when the default factory settings for both ends of the link are compatible.

TOI EOS 4.34.0F

When the system exhausts ECMP resources, the Transient ECMP feature enables route programming through a single available next-hop from the original ECMP route. Once the system can program the full ECMP route, the transient ECMP route is removed after successfully installing the ECMP route.

TOI EOS 4.34.0F