What are my options for EXOS Network Management Automation

[Tim_Black]

Hello, my team has developed an automated system for testing my company's networked products. I am in the process of integrating this system with EXOS switches, so that our tests will be able to track which switch ports are connected to which Devices Under Test (DUTs), and provide an API (in python) to facilitate making runtime configuration changes to the switches and their individual ports. We are planning to use the Management port of all switches to provide a dedicated backdoor in case a test makes an error in the switch configuration.

Before I just go off and implement a solution based on the EXOS telnet command interface, I am looking to the community for advice on whether this is the "best" switch interface to use for this purpose, what the alternatives and pros and cons of each are.

I am only aware of the SNMP alternative. I have not considered it very seriously yet because we are using these switches for, among other things, AVB media transport and monitoring, and the last I checked, the MIB does not yet support AVB-related interfaces, e.g. MSRP/MVRP and stream status.

Thanks for your consideration,
Tim

[James_A]

The XMC API is documented here https://emc.extremenetworks.com/content/oneview/docs/connect/docs/c_ov_connect_services.html but it's more about management and end-systems (user devices) than switch config directly. I also came across https://www.extremenetworks.com/support/api-app/ which has some EXOS APIs (and a wrong link for the JSONRPC one, https://api.extremenetworks.com has the correct one). I searched and couldn't find any mention of AVB, MSRP or MVRP though. Google turns up https://community.extremenetworks.com/extreme/topics/cant-import-api-from-exos (which is just running the commands from a python script on the switch).

[Tim_Black]

I did find this, which shows a way to remotely run a python exos script.

[Tim_Black]

It looks like the Ansible support for EXOS switches is still pretty immature, with only support for issuing individual commands:
https://github.com/extremenetworks/ansible-extreme#exos AND
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/devel/modules/exos_command_module.html

..although it looks like there are several people working on new modules now (exos_config and exos_facts) which have outstanding pull requests to the core ansible team. This is great, but not enough for my team at the moment, so I'm going to eliminate Ansible approach for now.

So I'm having trouble making sense of XMC - I assume you're referring to Extreme Management Center:
https://emc.extremenetworks.com/content/home.htm

This appears to be a Windows/Linux desktop application that can be used to manage exos switches. Not sure this is what Stephan meant.

So, for the time being, I'm going to stick with the CLI via telnet, but please send more info if you have experience with remote automated programmatic control of EXOS switches! Thanks!

[Tim_Black]

Stephan, James, thanks so much for your responses. Although I had seen some mention of a python API in other forum categories, I was not aware of XMC or its various interfaces. This is exactly the kind of information I am looking for. I will now search on here for more info on XMC. Please post some links to XMC documentation if you know where they are.

@James A, I would say the same about Ansible. I am familiar with Ansible for machine configuration management, and would be very interested in learning more about who is implementing the Ansible support and how mature it is.

[James_A]

Another option is ansible, for which there is now upstream support. I'm not sure what the coverage is like though.