TITLE:
A TestBed for Deployment of Datacenter Switches for Training Purposes
AUTHORS:
E. Sumanth Reddy, K. Pavan Kumar, Hamid Shahnasser
KEYWORDS:
Arista, Data Centre switches, Link Aggregation Control Protocol, MLAG, Access Control Lists, OSPF, Wireshark
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Computer and Communications,
Vol.5 No.3,
March
13,
2017
ABSTRACT: Today’s network industry needs highly qualified engineers to understand, configure, develop and upgrade switches that can build scalable high performance and ultra-low latency networks. This paper describes a new networking laboratory that has been set up to provide hands-on experience on datacenter network switches, such as ARISTA, programming and monitoring the traffic. This paper explains the networking laboratory coursework that students carry out during the course of a semester. The laboratory consists of six hands on experiments on the latest datacenter switches from Arista Networks, two programming assignments that teaches some of the protocols used at data link layer and routing protocols used at the network layer of OSI reference model. The final two laboratory experiments use the Wireshark software tool for traffic monitoring and peeking into details of some of the protocols in TCP/IP such as ARP protocol, Ethernet and so forth. The coursework details include the switch basics, switch hardware, Extensible Operating System (EOS), configuration of Link Aggregation Control Protocol, Multi-chassis Link Aggregation Protocol, Access Control Lists, and Open Short Path First version 2 on Arista switches 7050T-64 and 7048T-4S. The programming tasks cover High-level Data Link Control (HDLC) and Routing Algorithms.