Virtual Lightweight Collector Overview

Overview

The Juniper Networks® Virtual Lightweight Collector (vLWC) is a VMWare-ready data collection tool for the Juniper Support Insights. The vLWC is an alternative solution to the physical Lightweight Collector (LWC). It brings the capabilities of the LWC in a virtual package to free physical rack space in your data center by making use of your existing VMWare infrastructure.

Juniper Support Insights (JSI) is a cloud-based solution that provides IT and network operations teams with actionable operational insights into Junos devices on customer networks. JSI aims to transform the customer support experience by providing insights that help improve the network performance and uptime.

The vLWC as a data collection tool is installed on the customer's premises. This provides an added security to the data being collected as the data is locally collected and encrypted.

Virtual Network Interfaces for vLWC

The Virtual Lightweight Collector (vLWC) is installed with three network interfaces where two of the interfaces are the internal and external ports. The third interface is the management interface which will be used to access the vLWC through a JSI shell or a Captive Portal web page to configure network settings and troubleshoot issues. See Table 1.

Table 1: Network Interfaces for vLWC Interface Interface Name Description Internal int Internal network used to access the Junos devices being monitored by JSI. This network should not have access to the Internet. External ext External network with HTTP/HTTPS and DNS Internet connectivity used to connect to Juniper Cloud directly or through an active proxy server. Management cap Management network used to access JSI shell or Captive Portal web page. Port requirements: Port 443/HTTPS for the Captive Portal web page Port 22/SSH for the JSI shell

vLWC Installation Overview

The vLWC solution is a single VMWare vApp Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) file deployed on a VMWare virtual network. Anyone with an experience in deploying vApp on VMWare can deploy vLWC. You must configure the network interfaces (int, ext, and cap) to proper networks before the installation process of deploying the OVA file. Once installed in the VMWare environment, the vLWC vApp OVA package will consist of the vApp itself and a virtual machine (VM) named ggc-lnx attached to the vApp. The ggc-lnx VM runs the vLWC software and performs the data collection.

The following figure shows the overall deployment architecture for the vLWC, and how the vApp, VM, network interfaces, and VMWare networks relate to each other: