Automated installation of XOS and modules

[Jesper]

Hi,

I wish to perform software upgrades and module installations in an automated to be able to do mass upgrades and individual upgrades of both primary and secondary images while keeping SSH module installed through all reboots.

How would one go about doing this on XOS? It could be CLI scripted with expect but that's error prone and I require reliablity. May XML APIs be relied on for this? Any chance of using Ansible? Anyone got ideas or documentation?

I will need to apply configuration as well, but I couldn't find any information discussion upgrades.

[Drew_C]

Take a look at the "Download URL" and its list feature added to 16.1? The list option makes it a lot easier to download the xos and ssh xmod together, and install them both at the same time.
The documentation has info and examples: http://documentation.extremenetworks.com/exos/EXOS_All/Software_Upgrade_and_Boot_Options/c_download-...

Regarding SCP, here's How to upgrade EXOS using SCP.

[Jesper]

Hi,

Thanks for the response. I am aware of this, the question is rather if this can be done in a more robust and developer friendly way than scripting the CLI. For example, Junos has great NetConf support which makes this sort of work easy. I assumed Extremes equivalent is an XML API but it's not so simple to find wheter that it the right tool to use. Maybe it is CLI scripting (SSH+expect) after all that should be used with XOS switches? Can I at least get structured XML output from the common CLI commands?

[ed_mcguigan]

Jesper:
I had to upgrade more than 3,000 switches, including adding the SSH xmod module. I did it with Tcl/Expect. Not fun. EXOS CLI is not the best for this kind of thing. Various issues. Lack of SCP or FTP transport for images, inability to bundle main image and modules into one file for a single file transfer, general temperamental behavior of CLI, stack inconsistencies, the fact that it takes 10 minutes to generate the SSH key.

Plenty of room for improvement. The Netsight platform does not offer a solution either.

Best of luck.
Ed McGuigan.

[Jesper]

Glad to hear it, I'm looking forward to hearing more about it.