Tag :: TOI

Receive Side Scaling (RSS) which is also known as multi queue receive, distributes network receive flows across NIC card multiple hardware queues.

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.

This feature enables detection of abnormal system flows (total in vs. out packet counters) by showing packet loss

Flow control is a data transmission option that temporarily stops a device from sending data because of a peer data overflow condition. If a device sends data faster than the receiver can accept it, the receiver's buffer can overflow. The receiving device then sends a PAUSE frame, instructing the sending device to halt transmission for a specified period.

Forced periodic ARP refresh adds support for a mechanism that allows forcing ARP/NDP refresh requests to be sent in periodic intervals independently of ARP/NDP entries' confirmed time in the kernel. By default, when a neighbor entry gets confirmed by various processes such as ARP synchronization between MLAG peers, an ARP refresh request is not sent for at least another duration of ARP aging timeout (or ND cache expiry time for the IPv6 case). This feature provides support for a configuration to force sending refresh requests at the configured ARP/ND aging timeout regardless of the last confirmed time.

With the 18.0 release, you can send a copy of DHCP Packets from Access Points (AP) to Network Access Control (NAC) solutions for profiling clients and assigning appropriate network segments. When you enable the packet forwarding option on the UI, the AP forwards a copy of the DHCP packets to Port 67 of the destination server.

Forwarding destination prediction enables visibility into how a packet is forwarded through the switch, allowing you to determine which interfaces a packet would egress out of. Typical use cases include, but are not limited to, determining egress members for Port-Channels and ECMPs.

Forwarding destination prediction enables visibility into how a packet is forwarded through the switch and allows

Forwarding destination prediction allows users to determine which interface a given packet will egress out. This feature is enhanced to identify the TCAM bank and rule offset for the matched ACL rule responsible for the forwarding decision. This allows network operators to trace the egress result back to the exact rule that triggered the action.

This feature lets you freeze the channel and transmit power in the Auto mode to operate a specific radio at a specific channel number and transmit power. To switch to other channels, unfreeze the settings and select a custom channel and power, or enable the Auto mode to select the optimum channel and transmit power. Freeze and unfreeze Auto Channel Selection (ACS) and Transmit Power Control (TPC) configurations are configured for each radio. You can select multiple radios and freeze the ACS and TPC settings.

This feature adds support for the front panel Ethernet (Et) interface counters on the platforms listed below and enables the Et interfaces to dynamically adopt the counter values (packet and error) of interfaces (Switch, App interfaces etc.) related to the currently running FPGA application, based on user or default configuration. All Arista FPGA applications are supported. Both the receive and transmit packet counters can be independently configured for each interface, as desired. Counters are supported for interfaces of any speed including agile ports.

This feature enables the direct generation of public/private key pairs and TLS Certificate Signing Requests (CSRs) on Atlas appliances. The previous workflow required generating keys and CSRs externally, followed by importing the private key and CA-signed certificate. This enhancement simplifies the process by securely retaining the private key on the appliance, eliminating the need for external key management.

Generic UDP Encapsulation (GUE) is a general method for encapsulating packets of arbitrary IP protocols within a UDP tunnel. GUE provides an extensible header format with optional data. In this release, decap capability of GUE packets of variant 1 header format has been added. This variant allows direct encapsulation using the UDP header without the GUE header. The inner payload could be one of IPv4, IPv6, or MPLS.

When a user configures IPv6 ACLs, by default, the system automatically  includes two additional rules : a default

This feature provides a CLI to disable storm control policing on known multicast streams. By default, known multicast streams are policed by storm control policers and the behavior is consistent across all platforms supporting storm control feature. With the new CLI we can change the default policing behavior for known multicast streams.

Users can now define a global LAG hashing profile. The global LAG hashing profile will be applied to all linecards

This is an implementation of the gNOI Healthz RPCs (version 1.3.0). Note that RPC elements of the Healthz service are supported, and as of 4.33.1F, only the agent information is exposed in healthz yang component containers outlined as in the healthz service.

gNPSI is an OpenConfig protocol designed to act as a proxy between the sFlow agent and interested gRPC clients. The gNPSI server receives datagrams from sFlow, repackages the datagrams in the protobuf message format and forwards these messages onto any subscribed gRPC clients. The protobuf used for this feature is available at the link above.

In the 18.0 release, along with Slack, you can also subscribe to Google Chat and Microsoft Teams webhooks to receive alerts in your conversation channels whenever a network issue or anomaly is detected. Note: This is a BETA feature. Reach out to your Arista account manager to enable it.

This is an extension to the IKE policy and SA policy configuration options available in EOS. The key lifetimes for IKE policies and SA policies are specifiable in hours. This feature allows specifying the key lifetimes in minutes as well.

This feature introduces the support for IPv4 ACL configuration under GRE and IPsec tunnel interfaces and IPv6 ACL configuration under GRE tunnel interfaces. The configured ACL rules are applied to a tunnel terminated GRE packet i.e. any IPv4/v6-over-GRE-over-IPv4 that is decapsulated by the GRE tunnel-interface on which the ACL is applied, or a packet terminated on IPsec tunnel i.e, IPv4-over-ESP-over-encrypted-IPv4 packet that is decapsulated and decrypted by the IPsec tunnel interface on which the ACL is applied.

This is an addendum to the “IP in IP decapsulation” document.When GRE decapsulation is configured using decap groups, incoming packets with an outer IP header having IPProto=47 (GRE) and a destination IP that matches the configured value will be decapsulated. This means that the outer IP and GRE headers will be removed from the packet, and all subsequent decisions will be based on the inner IP header.

By default,  inner IP header of a GRE packet is used for LAG hashing. With this feature, LAGs can hash GRE traffic

The feature allows a GRE tunnel to be resolved over another GRE tunnel. The two GRE tunnels may be in the same VRF or different VRFs.

Hardware-based GRE tunnel interface counters are supported on the DCS-7050X4 platform family starting from EOS-4.36.1 release. When GRE tunnels are configured and traffic is hardware-forwarded, per-tunnel packet and byte counters are available for both ingress (decapsulation) and egress (encapsulation) directions. The hardware tunnel counters are disabled by default and must be explicitly enabled using the `hardware counter feature` CLI command. The ingress and egress counters can be enabled independently.

This feature introduces hardware forwarding support for IPv4-over-IPv4 GRE tunnel interfaces on selected Arista Switches. The GRE tunnel interface acts as a logical interface which performs the GRE encapsulation or decapsulation.

gRIBI (gRPC Routing Information Base Interface) defines an interface through which OpenConfig AFT (Abstract Forwarding Table) entries can be injected from an external client to a network element.

The Segment security feature provides the convenience of applying policies on segments rather than interfaces or subnets. Hosts/networks are classified into segments based on prefixes. Grouping prefixes into segments allows for definition of policies that govern flow of traffic between segments. Policies define inter-segment or intra-segment communication rules, e.g. segment A can communicate with segment B but hosts in segment B can not communicate with each other.

This feature involves the use of packet’s Time to Live (TTL) (IPv4) or Hop Limit (IPv6) attributes to protect

EOS-4.24.0 adds support for hardware-accelerated sFlow on R3 systems. Without hardware acceleration, all sFlow processing is done in software, which means performance is heavily dependent on the capabilities of the host CPU. Aggressive sampling rates also decrease the amount of processing time available for other EOS applications.

Arista campus switches allow extensive and fine grained hardware based flow tracking and management features. They

In ingress/egress and fabric/egress replication mode, on DCS 7280E, DCS 7280R, DCS 7500E and DCS 7500R, Broadcast,

The Hardware Switch Controller (HSC) provides an integration point between the SDN controllers (NSX or Nuage) and

Hardware Table Capacity Monitoring is a new feature to keep track of the capacity and utilization of various hardware forwarding resources and generate alerts/syslogs when the utilization exceeds a threshold value. Users can keep track of the current usage statistics using a single show command, and also configure thresholds on a per-resource basis, to be notified about any high-utilization upfront, before reaching any resource limits. The Main use-case would be for troubleshooting in overflow situations and avoid overflows altogether by taking corrective actions on high utilization.

EOS-4.20.5 adds support for hardware-accelerated sFlow on compatible R2 platforms.

Use View Heatmap for Switch to filter Access Points (AP) connected to a specific switch. If multiple switches are placed on a floor map and all have APs connected to them, the APs and their data may overlap on the floor map. It becomes difficult to comprehend data when they overlap. Use this feature to view APs connected to a specific switch. The opacity of other APs connected to other switches decreases on the floor map. Exit the heatmap to see all the APs again.

Hierarchical Forwarding Equivalence Class (HFEC) changes a FEC from a single flat level to a multi level FEC

This feature allows capturing packets and byte counts at high resolution on physical interfaces, down to 1 ms granularity. Allows for detecting anomalous packet flows, or confirming the expected bandwidth usage. Requires selecting a set of interfaces to sample, a time resolution, and sampling duration.

Keeping Wi Fi Access Point (AP) firmware up to date allows network administrators to take advantage of the latest

This feature introduces support for scaling both IPv4 and IPv6 hosts on our devices. Existing MDB profiles offer a maximum host scale of 128k with unique MAC rewrites. However, if hosts share the MAC rewrites, the scale can reach up to 204k. To address this issue, we are introducing a new MDB profile that will support a host scale of up to 192k when each host has a unique MAC rewrite. If hosts share the MAC rewrites, the scale can reach up to 256k.

Hotspot 2.0 is a standard for public-access Wi-Fi that enables seamless roaming among Wi-Fi networks and between Wi-Fi and cellular networks. With Hotspot 2.0, Passpoint-certified mobile devices such as laptops and smartphones can automatically discover and connect to Wi-Fi networks without the need of signing in manually. It is based on IEEE 802.11u standard for Interworking with External Networks. 

With the 15.0 release, CloudVision Cognitive Unified Edge(CV-CUE) provides you the ability to list down Vulnerable SSIDs and Hotspot SSIDs. CV-CUE takes action on the listed SSIDs according to the applied WIPS policy. 

External controllers can communicate with HSC (Hardware Switch Controller) running on CVX/EOS using the OVSDB

This is an extension to BGP EVPN VPNs that allow us to use iBGP as the PE-CE protocol. This feature also provides a way to isolate the customer’s network BGP attributes from the SP backbone’s attributes, by saving them into a special attribute called ATTR_SET, code 128. This separation introduces a “route server” model that allows the customer’s BGP path attributes to be stored in the SP backbone along with the VPN-IPv4/v6 paths.

ICMP Probe allows querying of interface status and ARP or Neighbor Discovery table status remotely.  It is a request/response protocol, similar to ping, but instead of simply responding to the request, it responds with information about a local interface or a remote neighbor.  The node being queried is called the "proxy node".

Arista switches enable high precision time distribution directly in the data path using IEEE1588 Precision Time

IFA Latency Analyzer feature measures round trip time(RTT) and per-hop latency( residence time) between source and destination switches by sending IFA(Inband Flow Analyzer) probes. On Switch A, in this version of script, packet is first redirected to an internal loopback interface and latency is measured as time duration between the time the packet ingresses internal loopback port to time it egresses out of the interface connected Switch B in the chip pipeline.

IFA Latency Analyzer feature measures round trip time(RTT) and per-hop latency( residence time) between source and destination switches by sending IFA(Inband Flow Analyzer) probes.

IGMP Snooping Proxy feature is an optimization over IGMP snooping. When IGMP Snooping Proxy is enabled, the switch

This feature enables the user to configure a list or range of BGP attributes to be ignored by the router on receipt of a BGP update message. The BGP attributes are discarded from the BGP update message, and unless the action of discarding an attribute causes the update message to trigger error handling, then the update message is parsed as normal.