Help us improve your experience.

Let us know what you think.

Do you have time for a two-minute survey?

TechLibrary
Navigation
Table of Contents
Guide That Contains This Content
[+] Expand All
[-] Collapse All

    Introduction to NorthStar Controller Installation and Configuration

    You can install the NorthStar Controller in the following ways:

    • RPM bundle installation on a physical server
    • Two-VM installation in an OpenStack environment

    Refer to the release notes for your specific NorthStar Controller release for a list of downloadable files and the software/documentation download location. Be sure to see NorthStar Controller System Requirements for system requirements and recommendations.

    After you successfully install the NorthStar Controller software, you must establish a connection between the NorthStar Controller and the network by configuring Path Computation Element Protocol (PCEP) on each PE router to configure the router as a Path Computation Client (PCC). A PCC supports the configurations related to the Path Computation Element (PCE) and communicates with the NorthStar Controller (PCE), which by default is configured to accept a PCEP connection from any source address. After you have established communication between the NorthStar Controller and the PCCs, you can configure topology acquisition using BGP-LS. For BGP-LS topology acquisition, you must configure both the NorthStar Controller and the PCC routers.

    Note:

    We recommend that you use BGP-LS instead of IGP adjacency for topology acquisition for the following reasons:

    • The OSPF and IS-IS databases have lifetime timers, which means that if the OSPF or IS-IS neighbor is down, the corresponding database is not removed immediately. The NorthStar Controller is, therefore, not able to determine whether the topology is valid.
    • Using BGP-LS minimizes the risk of making the JunosVM a transit router between AS areas if the GRE metric is not properly configured.
    • Typically, the NorthStar Controller is located in a network operations center (NOC) data center, multihops away from the backbone and MPLS TE routers. This is easily accommodated by BGP-LS, but more difficult for IGP protocols because they would have to employ a tunneling mechanism such as GRE to establish adjacency.
     

    Related Documentation

     

    Modified: 2017-07-05

    Previous Page Next Page