Cisco Device Agent

Although the preferred method of installing device system agents is by creating agents in the Apstra GUI, you can manually install Apstra agents from the CLI. Only in rare exceptions is it needed to manually install agents, which requires more effort and is error-prone. An in-depth understanding of the various device states, configuration stages, and agent operations is required before manually installing agents. For assistance, contact Juniper Support.

Manually installing an agent for Cisco devices involves the following steps:

• Modify the guestshell disk size, memory and cpu, and restart the guestshell in order to take effect.
• Copy the device agent from the Apstra Server and installing it.
• Modify the aos_config file.

CAUTION:

The Cisco GuestShell is not partitioned to be unique with Apstra. If there are other applications hosting on the guestshell, any changes in the guestshell could impact them.

CAUTION:

Commands in the "Bootstrap" or "Pristine" configuration may interfere with Apstra configuration added during fabric deployment.

Adding NX-OS configuration "system jumbomtu" with a value lower than MTUs used by Apstra causes Apstra MTU commands to fail.

Configuration steps must happen in order on NX-OS - VRF, NXAPI, GuestShell, Create Management VRF. Apstra's device agent requires the use of VRF of the name management to allow for agent-server communication. Ensure these lines appear in the running configuration.

Either the guestshell is running or not restarting or enabling the service is required after the the following step.

Resize the guestshell disk space, memory and cpu by executing the next commands:

If the guestshell is not enable, proceed to activate it by executing "guestshell enable", otherwise, if it was already running please run "guestshell reboot" command in order to restart the shell.

Verify that the guestshell is activated again:

We can easily copy the installation agents over HTTPS from the Apstra server. After downloading, confirm the MD5sum of your downloaded copy matches what Apstra stores.

Note:

The Cisco device needs to connect to the Apstra server using HTTPS in order to retrieve the agent file, please make sure that this connectivity is OK before proceeding.

Apstra ships the agent from the Apstra Server. We can copy it to the /volatile, or volatile: filesystem location. Apstra also ships with an md5sum file in the /home/admin folder on the Apstra Server.

Replace the aos_server_ip variable and aos_version from the run file below, you can find this exact version from the Apstra Server, Platform --> About (i.e '3.2.2-12')

Validate that the file was downloaded correctly.

The Apstra agent on Cisco is installed by running it as a shell script directly as root on the Cisco NXOS switch. This command must be done within the guest shell. After installing the agent and before starting the service, aos.conf file needs to be modified to connect to the server.

Note:

We recommend that you save your current running-config to the startup-config 'copy running-config startup-config' to save your latest changes in case of any issue.

Change the required parameters in the Apstra configuration file before enabling the Apstra service (see next steps).

You can configure the Cisco NX-OS device agent configuration file directly at /etc/aos/aos.conf. See Apstra device agent configuration file for parameters. After updating the file, start the Apstra device agent. with the command service aos start.

When the Apstra device agent communicates with Apstra, it uses a ‘device key’ to identify itself. For Cisco NXOS switches, the device key is the MAC address of the management interface ‘eth0’.

From the left navigation menu of the Apstra GUI, navigate to Devices > Managed Devices. When the agent is up and running it appears in this list, and can be acknowledged and assigned to a Blueprint using the GUI per standard procedure.

If you need to reset the Apstra agent for some reason (changing blueprints, redeploying, restoring device from backup, etc.) it's best to clear the Apstra agent metadata, re-register the device, and redeploy to the blueprint.

To uninstall the agent, first undeploy and unassign it from the blueprint per standard procedures using the GUI. You can also delete it entirely from the Managed Devices page.

To remove the Apstra package from NX-OS, destroy the guestshell. Do this only if no other applications are using the guestshell:

The Apstra device agent installs some event manager applets to assist with telemetry. These can be safely removed

C9K-172-20-65-5(config)# no event manager applet AOS_PROTO_VSH_LAUNCH C9K-172-20-65-5(config)# no event manager applet AOS_STATS_VSH_LAUNCH C9K-172-20-65-5(config)# no event manager applet aos_bgp_applet C9K-172-20-65-5(config)# no event manager applet aos_ifdown_applet C9K-172-20-65-5(config)# no event manager applet aos_ifup_applet

The Apstra agent runs under the NXOS guestshell to interact with the underlying bash and Linux environments. This is an internal Linux Container (LXC) in which Apstra operates. Under LXC, Apstra makes use of the NXAPI and other methods to directly communicate with NXOS. For security reasons, Cisco partitions much of the LXC interface away from the rest of the NXOS device, so we must drop to the guest shell bash prompt to perform more troubleshooting commands.

Confirm the Guest Shell is running on NX-OS The Apstra agent runs under the NXOS Guest Shell to interact with the underlying bash and linux environments. This is an internal Linux Container (LXC) in which Apstra operates. We are checking to make sure the guest shell is activated and running.

Showing registered services

• Confirm Network Reachability to Apstra
• Confirm Agent Installation
• Check that Apstra Agent is Running
• Check for Presence of Files in /etc/aos
• Check for Apstra Data in /var/log/aos
• Determine Apstra Agent Version
• DNS Resolution Failure
• Apstra Service Takes Long Time to Start on Cisco NX-OS
• Apstra Stops and ails Without Errors (MGMT VRF)
• Verify MGMT VRF in NX-OS Guest Shell