New Features

Device Life-Cycle Management

Device life-cycle management (LCM) extends over the entire life cycle of a device. As part of device LCM, you install the device onsite, bring the device under management, monitor the device when it is in production, and finally decommission the device.

Juniper Routing Director Release 2.6.0 extends device LCM to the following platforms and provides the following additional features:

• Device support—Onboard the following devices to Routing Director and manage them:

  • ACX6360 and QFX5200 (onboard device, view inventory, view configuration, back up configuration, reboot device),.

  • Nokia 7750 SR-s [(onboard device and configure the devices by using configuration templates and Network Configuration protocol (NETCONF)].

• Assign tags to devices and interfaces using profiles—Use the Manage Tags option on the Device and Interface Profiles page (Inventory > Devices > Device and Interface Profiles) to assign tags to device profiles, interface profiles, and port profiles. After you assign the tags, they are automatically applied to the devices and interfaces associated with the respective profiles.

  [See About the Device and Interface Profiles Page.]

• Configure installation of Test Agents during device onboarding—You have enhanced flexibility and control over the installation of Test Agents and validation of the device readiness by configuring the following two options in a network implementation plan:

  • Enable Active Assurance: When you enable this option, Active Assurance-related tests are configured on devices during the onboarding process.

  • Wait for Test Results: When you enable this option, the onboarding workflow pauses for Active Assurance test results to be available and record them in the service order before proceeding.

  If you disable these options, the workflow skips the installation of Test Agents and the waiting for test results, resulting in a quicker onboarding process.

  [See Device Onboarding Workflow.]

• Updates to network implementation plan—We have the following updates to the network implementation plan:

  • Use the Use Cases option present on the Create Network Implementation Plan page (Inventory > Device Onboarding > Network Implementation Plan > Add) to select use cases and configure the selected use cases on devices associated with the network implementation plan. You can select one or more of the following use cases:

    • Active Assurance

    • Infrastructure Configuration

    • Observability

    • Optimization

    • Service Orchestration

    When you create or edit a network implementation plan, you can see only those parameters that are relevant to the selected use cases. The parameters visible on the device and interface profiles also depend on the use cases selected in the plan associated with the profiles.

  • You can view all interfaces available on a device linked to the network implementation plan on the Physical Ports tab of the Add Device and Edit Device pages of the Add Network Implementation Plan wizard. To manage these interfaces through Routing Director, you must select the interfaces and click the Set Manage button on the Physical Ports tab.

  [See Add a Network Implementation Plan.]

• Automatically back up configuration changes—On the Manage Automatic Backup page (Inventory > Devices > Network Inventory > More > Manage Automatic Backup) you can enable automatic backup of the active configurations in Juniper devices whenever changes to the configuration are committed.

  You can view details of the backups taken on the Configuration Backups page (Inventory > Devices > Configuration Backups).

  [See About the Inventory Page.]

• Execute Shell commands on devices from Routing Director GUI—The Open CLI option on the Troubleshoot Devices page (Observability > Health > Troubleshoot Devices) enables a Super User to directly access a Juniper device’s shell and execute CLI commands.

  This option helps Super Users to perform advanced diagnostics, verify configurations, and resolve issues more efficiently without needing to switch tools or interfaces.

  [See About the Troubleshoot Devices Page.]

• Onboard and manage non-Juniper devices using NETCONF—Routing Director has the NETCONF Enabled option added to the Add a Device page (Inventory > Devices > Network Inventory > Add Device > Add a Device). Enable this option to onboard a non-Juniper device to Routing Director and manage the device using the NETCONF protocol.

  [See Add a Device to Routing Director.]

Observability

You can use Routing Director to view your entire network topology in real time and monitor network health. Additionally, you receive notifications about network anomalies and troubleshooting guidance.

With observability, Routing Director monitors and analyzes the network and its components by using key performance indicators (KPIs), device logs, and metrics. Observability includes alerts and alarms that notify you about network issues.

Routing Director also runs connectivity tests using synthetic traffic to identify connection issues between devices in your network. In addition, the real-time routing dashboard allows you to actively monitor the overall routing health of your network. Timely detection of anomalies enables you to take prompt action and minimize the impact of any issues.

Juniper Routing Director Release 2.6.0 provides the following additional observability features:

• Group custom rules—Use Routing Director to group custom rules by topics. When you upload a rule from the Rule List page (Observability > Health > Custom KPI Collection > Custom Rules > Rules List), you can select a topic to associate with the rule. A topic helps to logically group similar custom rules, and these rules are displayed under their corresponding accordions on the Device-Name page (Observability > Troubleshoot Devices > Device-Name). You can group custom rules under the following topics:

  • custom.hardware—For rules that monitor hardware health and performance.
  • custom.interfaces—For rules that manage network interfaces.
  • custom.routing—For rules that manage routing protocols and their performance.
  • custom—For rules that are not related to any predefined topics such as interface, hardware, or routing.

  The custom key performance indicator (KPI) data collection and topic-based grouping are also supported for third-party devices.

  [See Custom KPIs Data and Test Results.]

• View IGP anomalies—Use Routing Director to collect interior gateway protocol (IGP) state and link-state data from devices and display the results on the IGP Heatmap page (Observability > Routing > Route Topology). You can view details such as the total number of anomalies detected, description of the anomaly, and timestamp when the anomaly was detected. The IGP anomaly detection gives end-to-end network visibility, which allows you to quickly identify issues in your network.

  [See About the IGP Nodes Tab.]

• Colour classification in IGP Heatmap—You can use Routing Director’s color-coded IGP Heatmap to assess the severity of alerts for nodes and links, providing insight into network health.

  The circles represent node (device) or cluster health, and the color of each circle corresponds to the highest severity of the alerts. The rings represent link or bundle health, and each ring is segmented in proportion to the severity of the alerts.

  The alert severity levels and their corresponding colors are as follows:

  • Critical—Red

  • Major—Orange

  • Minor—Yellow

  • Info—White

  [See View Route Topology Details.]

• Routing Director chatbot—Use Routing Director chatbot (LLM Connector) to facilitate the use of natural language to query network status and obtain troubleshooting information, without using CLI commands.

  LLM Connector can help you:

  • Retrieve device information.

  • Execute Junos OS operational commands.

  • Save data (configuration and logs) to a file.

  • Retrieve a list of all VPNs in your network and their details, metrics, and health information.

  • Fetch information about customers and service instances associated with customers.

  • Get insights based on the telemetry data collected from the device.

  • Get insights based on the telemetry data derived from the metrics collected by Test Agents.

  • Plot various metrics and state graphs dynamically. For example, LLM Connector can plot data related to CPU usage, device temperature, memory usage, packet loss, BGP session status, interface statistics, and so on.

  • Answer aggregation queries such as top five power consuming devices, bottom five power consuming devices, and average interface utilization on device X.

  To use the LLM Connector tool, you must set up a large language model (LLM). The recommended LLM model for LLM Connector is GPT-4 and GPT-4o.

  [See LLM Connector Overview.]

• Monitor device health and temperature using AI-ML—Routing Director uses artificial intelligence-machine learning (AI-ML) to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) of device health to detect anomalies. Routing Director monitors the KPIs for the following components:

  • Fans [revolutions per minute (RPM)]

  • Line cards (CPU utilization, memory utilization, and temperature)

  • Routing Engine (CPU utilization, memory utilization, and temperature)

  • Interfaces (optical temperature, optical Tx power, optical Rx power, input traffic, and output traffic)

  • Power supply unit (percentage of power consumed by the power supply unit)

  Routing Director also performs root cause analysis (RCA) of device temperature anomalies.

  [See Automatically Monitor Device and Interface Health and Detect Anomalies.]

• Detect blackholes on PTX10008 devices using AI-ML—Routing Director uses artificial intelligence–machine learning (AI-ML) to detect blackhole (packet drops) on PTX10008 devices and generates a Blackhole Detected alert to notify about the event. On the Traffic Loss page (Observability > Troubleshoot Devices > click Device-Name > Routing and MPLS accordion > Traffic Loss), you can view:

  • Graphs—Depicts input packet rate, output packet rate, and packet drops.

  • Alerts—Provides details of alerts and traffic flows affected by packet drops.

  [See Detect Blackholes.]

Trust and Compliance

Routing Director helps protect the network from threats and vulnerabilities by periodically checking whether a target's configuration, integrity, and performance comply with predefined security benchmarks. The term target refers to a device or a device component. Routing Director distills the outcomes of these checks into a single trust score that you can use to determine how trustworthy a device is.

Juniper Routing Director Release 2.6.0 provides the following additional trust and compliance features:

• Create, customize, and delete a benchmark document—You can create a benchmark document using the default or existing benchmarks documents. You can select and edit the rules of the custom benchmark document depending on your network requirements. You can only delete a benchmark document that is not used for a compliance scan.

  [See About the Compliance Benchmarks Page and Create a Benchmark Document.]

Service Orchestration

Service orchestration is the process of designing, configuring, validating, deploying, and monitoring a network service. Routing Director automates the entire life cycle of a network service by providing workflows that execute the tasks required to deliver a service. You can provision various network services by using predefined service designs. The Service Catalog is an inventory of service designs, which are templates that provide guidelines and parameters for instantiating a service. A service instance defines the elements of a service. A service order includes the instruction to create, modify, or delete a service instance. After you initiate a service order and provision it, Routing Director activates the automated workflow to provision the service in the network. After provisioning, Routing Director automatically monitors network health and measures service quality.

Juniper Routing Director Release 2.6.0 provides the following additional service orchestration features:

• Configure BGP color community to automate steering of L3VPN traffic—You can configure a BGP color community to enable automatic steering of L3VPN traffic over diversely routed label-switched paths (LSPs). On the Resource Instances page (Orchestration > Resource Instances > Modify Resource-Instance > vpn-resources > Colors), assign a unique color value that matches the color attribute configured on the LSPs. Subsequently, select the color of the BGP community when provisioning an L3VPN service.

  [See Configure Resource Pools for Resource Instances and Add an L3VPN Service Instance.]

• Enable an EVPN service to span multiple device platforms—Toggle Multiplatform to True on the Add E-LAN EVPN CSM page (Orchestration > Instances) to enable the VPN service to span multiple device platforms when provisioning an E-LAN EVPN CSM service. This configuration enables interoperability across devices running Junos OS and Junos OS Evolved, such as, ACX series and MX series devices.

  [See Add an EVPN or EVPN-VPWS Service Instance.]

• Configure Q-in-Q tunneling for EVPN-VPWS and L2 circuit services—You can assign a Q-in-Q tag, in addition to a Dot1q tag, to an Ethernet interface for E-Line EVPN VPWS CSM and E-Line L2Circuit NSM services. Assign both an inner customer VLAN ID and an outer service VLAN ID to the same interface when you use a Q-in-Q tag.

  You can assign Q-in-Q as the tag type for interfaces when you add node details to the topology resource pool and devices in the network implementation plan.

  [See Add EVPN or EVPN-VPWS Service Site Details, Add L2 Circuit VPN Nodes, Configure Resource Pools for Resource Instances, Add a Network Implementation Plan.]

• Configure an IRB interface for EVPN services—You can configure an IRB interface for EVPN services for the following scenarios:

  • EVPN with Ethernet interface port mode.

  • EVPN with Ethernet interface VLAN mode.

  • EVPN with Aggregate Ethernet interface port mode.

  • EVPN with Aggregate Ethernet interface VLAN mode.

  [See Add EVPN or EVPN-VPWS Service Site Details and Add an EVPN or EVPN-VPWS Service Instance.]

Network Optimization

The network optimization use case in Routing Director enables you to optimize the utilization of network resources, enhance network performance, and ensure reliable and efficient delivery of data across the network. Routing Director optimizes the network by managing the life cycle of label-switched paths (LSPs) through an intent-based approach.

You can create a path intent using the Routing Director GUI. Path intents are specific LSP configurations that define how traffic is steered through the network. In traditional methods, you configure and provision each path in a tunnel individually with all its attributes. With path intent, you can create sub-profiles of attributes that can be reused for creating paths. This modular approach reduces redundancy and streamlines the process of provisioning multiple tunnels.

When you apply the path intent to the network, Routing Director interprets these intent-based sub-profiles and automates the creation, modification, and deletion of tunnels and LSPs. By autonomously executing the required actions, Routing Director aligns the network state with the specified intent. Routing Director ensures that LSPs are established based on network policies, traffic engineering constraints, and service level agreements (SLAs).

Juniper Routing Director Release 2.6.0 provides the following network optimization features:

• Configurable interface delay type—You can now configure the interface delay value (minimum, maximum, or average) for Routing Director to determine the best path for LSPs. In earlier releases, Routing Director used only average interface delay values for path computation.

  You can configure the Interface Delay Type on the Pathfinder Settings section of the Organization Settings page (Settings Menu > System Settings).

  [See Manage Organization Settings.]

• Set retention policies and database cleanup frequency—Routing Director enables you to define how often (in days) the database must be cleaned up for your organization. In addition, you can specify the number of days you want to retain simulated reports and health-check reports.

  On the Organization Settings page (Settings Menu > System Settings), you can configure these policies for a specific organization or for all organizations in your network.

  [See Manage Organization Settings.]

• View historical data for SR LSPs—You can monitor historical traffic data for both colored and non-colored Segment Routing (SR) LSPs on the Topology page (Observability > Topology > Tunnels tab). For Routing Director to collect this data, you must enable the traffic engineering option when you create the device profile.

  You can view historical data for both Juniper Networks and Cisco devices.

  Note: We do not support traffic statistics collection for ACX Series devices.

  [See About the Tunnels Tab.]

• Reroute tunnels based on user-defined constraints—Routing Director enables you to automatically reroute label-switched paths (LSPs) based on the following constraints:

  • Link utilization violation—Configure Threshold Rerouting Interval, Link Utilization Violation Interval, and Link Utilization Violation Count parameters to automatically reroute LSPs when a specific number of link utilization violation occurs over a specific time duration.
  • Tunnel delay violation—Configure Tunnel Delay Violation Interval and Tunnel Delay Violation Count parameters to automatically reroute LSPs when a specific number of tunnel delay violations occur over a specific time duration.

  You can configure these parameters on the Organization Settings page (Settings Menu > System Settings). If any of these parameters exceed its maximum limit, then Routing Director automatically reroutes the tunnel to an alternative path that meets the criteria. If no viable path is available, Routing Director marks the LSP status as Down.

  [See Reroute LSPs.]

• LSP bandwidth sizing—Enable label-switched paths(LSP) bandwidth sizing for RSVP and segment routing (SR) LSPs for Routing Director to calculate and adjust the planned bandwidth for LSPs, based on configured thresholds. Routing Director periodically evaluates aggregated traffic statistics to adjust the bandwidth of LSPs by assessing their current and planned bandwidth needs.

  Routing Director allows you to automate the decision-making process by comparing the existing bandwidth allocation against newly calculated requirements, guided by predefined thresholds. Routing Director determines which LSPs require resizing based on the LSP's provisioning type and current bandwidth status.

  [See Bandwidth Sizing and Manage Organization Settings.]

• Network optimization support for Cisco devices running IOS-XR—Starting in Release 2.6.0, we support the following network optimization features for Cisco devices running Cisco IOS-XR OS:

  • Provision tunnels and policies using an intent-based approach (tunnel profiles, optimization profiles, endpoint groups, and path intents).
  • Provision NETCONF for traffic engineering policies.
  • Enable RSVP-Traffic Engineering (RSVP-TE) tunnel provisioning and management, and implement SR-MPLS policies.
  • Allow configuration of colored segment routing–traffic engineering (SR-TE) policies for traffic steering.
  • Discover Cisco devices using the dynamic topology feature and view devices-related information (interface, link, and so on) on the topology map.
  • View dual Path Computation Element Protocol (PCEP) sessions for a Cisco device on the topology map.
  • Add or remove delegation for RSVP-TE tunnels.

  • View historical data for tunnel traffic, tunnel delay, interface traffic, and interface delay.

    Note: For historical data collection:

    • You must configure the IOS-XR’s performance-measurement module to publish one-way measurement for every 60 seconds.
    • Telemetry features are supported only for logical interfaces, physical interfaces, RSVP LSPs, and SR Color LSPs .
    • We have qualified this feature only for Cisco XRv 9000 with OS versions 7.5.1, 7.8.1, and 24.3.1. For the remaining Cisco devices, collecting historical data is a Beta feature.

Planner

Planner is used for offline visualization and detailed architectural planning of any production network. Planner enables you to forecast the impact of changes to your network, such as additional traffic, shifts in traffic flows, and new capacity or services,.

Planner generates a topology view of a network, enabling you to add, remove, and reconfigure network elements. Using the network topology view, you can model and visualize dynamic, explicit routing paths, designed to operate within end-user defined constraints. The effects of these changes and other traffic scenarios can be simulated without affecting the production network.

Juniper Routing Director Release 2.6.0 provides the following planner feature:

• Import offline network models from a different controller application—Import offline network models from Paragon Automation (Pathfinder, Planner, Insights) and NorthStar Controller into Routing Director for comprehensive data analysis and reuse.

  To ensure compatibility with Routing Director, you must first convert the network model to the JSON format using a script (spec2json.sh) and later import the network model using the Routing Director GUI.

  This feature enables you to leverage the capabilities of Routing Director for improved operational insights and network data analysis.

  [See Import Network Models from Paragon Automation and NorthStar Controller.]

• View SRLGs in your offline network—Import your live network model, that includes information on Shared Risk Link Groups (SRLGs), to Planner. You can view SRLG-related information on the SRLG tab of the offline network table (Planning > Networks > Offline Models > Model-Name > Open).

  In addition, you can simulate an exhaustive failure of SRLGs and view reports related to the SRLG failure.

  [See About the SRLGs Page (Planner).]

• View and configure SR tunnels in offline network models—Import segment routing (SR) tunnels directly from your live network using the More > Import from Live Network option on the Working Models page (Planning > Networks > Offline Models).

  You can view and configure SR tunnels on the Tunnels page of your offline network table (Planning > Networks > Offline Models > Model-Name > Open).

  [See About the Tunnel Tab (Planner) and What-if Failure Simulation.]

• What-if failure simulation for network impact analysis—Use what-if failure simulation to evaluate your network's response to potential failures of specific devices, links, or Shared Risk Link Groups (SRLGs). After the simulation, review the generated reports to analyze the impact of these failures.

  This feature allows you to manually select particular network elements to understand the impact of various failures, enhance control, and interpret results more efficiently.

  [See What-if Failure Simulation.]

Active Assurance

Active Assurance is a programmable test and monitoring solution, which generates synthetic traffic in the underlay network to gain continuous insights on network quality, availability, and performance. Active Assurance uses Test Agents, which are measurement points in your network. Test Agents generate and receive synthetic traffic, and enable you to continuously monitor and validate the infrastructure. You can deploy Test Agents at strategic locations in your network and install them on routers running Junos OS Evolved, x86 hardware, or on virtual machines (VMs). Routing Director uses RPM to collect metrics data for Juniper Networks® MX Series Universal Routers and Juniper Networks® PTX Series Routers.

Juniper Routing Director Release 2.6.0 provides the following additional Active Assurance features:

• Support for additional plug-ins—Routing Director enables you to evaluate the QoS in your network using the following plug-ins:

  • Path Trace—You can measure network performance by identifying the actual routes that packets travel from source to destination and back. You can also evaluate the round-trip latency along the path, validate the traffic path, and detect network delays.
  • RPM RFC 2544—You can measure network performance based on the test methodology defined in Request for Comment (RFC) 2544. You can evaluate metrics such as a series of metrics such as throughput, latency, frame loss, and back-to-back frames. These metrics are important to benchmark network performance and validate service quality.

  • Packet Capture—You can capture and records real-time network traffic on a selected Test Agent interface to view detailed packet-level information, including headers and payloads. Use packet capture to troubleshoot connectivity issues and validate network behavior.

    [See Supported Plug-ins.]

• Interactive topology visualization for path trace analysis—You can analyze traffic paths on the Topology tab (Observability > Monitors > Monitor-Name > Measurement-Name > Pathtrace). The topology view allows you to evaluate end-to-end routes and understand routing behaviors. The topology tab has three components:

  • Interactive topology view—You can identify active paths and inspect successive intermediate hops.

  • Topology traces view—You can review all traces captured for a specific duration. Each trace entry shows details such as last active time, active duration, unresponsive hops, and customizable display options.

  • Topology timeline view—You can track historical routing changes for a specific duration. . You can also select a time range, highlight traces, and analyze the routing changes and frequency of different paths taken by the traffic.

  [See About the Topology Tab (Path Trace).]

• Analyze packet capture results—View, download, and analyze packet capture results from the PCAP Results tab (Observability > Active Assurance > Measurement Explorer > Packet-Capture-Name). You can view detailed information such as capture name, description, time range, and events generated. In addition, you can download the captured data as a .pcap file and analyze the packet data offline by using a packet analyzer such as Wireshark or tcpdump.

  [See About the Packet Capture Page.]

• View the list of Measurements—View a consolidated list of all Measurements in your network on the Measurement Explorer page (Observability > Active Assurance > Measurement Explorer).. You can configure a measurement to define parameters and evaluation criteria used to collect performance data from the Measurement Designer page (Observability > Active Assurance > Measurement Designer) and view the details of each configured measurement such as measurement name, Plug-in used, associated Test Agent, and creation time.

  [See About the Measurement Explorer Page.]

• Support for Test Agent Appliances—Use Routing Director to register and run Test Agent Appliances in your network. A Test Agent Appliance is a full-fledged Test Agent with a built-in operating system, which provides you full control over network configuration and supports advanced functionalities. The Test Agent Appliance is based on the Debian Linux operating system. It is delivered as:

  • Dedicated Test Agent—Download the Test Agent Appliance software image and install the software image on custom x86 hardware.

  • Test Agent virtual network function—Upload a Test Agent software image to a virtualization platform and run the platform as a virtual machine (VM) on a hypervisor. Currently, Routing Director supports installation on Proxmox and KVM.

  After you install a Test Agent Appliance on a platform, Routing Director discovers the Test Agent Appliance. You can view the discovered Test Agent Appliance on the Test Agents page (Inventory > Active Assurance > Test Agents).

  [See Install Test Agent Appliance.]

• Install Test Agent Appliance on custom x86 hardware—You can install Test Agent Appliance on x86 hardware. For the installation, create a bootable USB flash drive with the Test Agent Appliance software image and use the USB flash drive to boot the hardware. Register the installed Test Agent Appliance with Routing Director to start collecting measurements in your network.

  As an alternative to this deployment method, you can use virtual machine-based deployment to install a Test Agent Appliance. Routing Director supports installation of Test Agent Appliance on Proxmox.

  [See Install Test Agent Appliance.]

• Configure RPM Cisco TWAMP Reflector using GUI—You can configure an RPM Cisco Two-Way Active measurement protocol (TWAMP) Reflector measurement testing from the Measurement Designer page (Observability > Active Assurance > Measurement Designer > Create a Test/Monitor).

  The RPM Cisco TWAMP Reflector task measures network performance by running Two-Way Active measurement protocol (TWAMP) tests on Cisco devices. This test sets up a reflector for TWAMP senders to evaluate metrics like round-trip delay, jitter, and packet loss between TWAMP clients and Cisco devices (reflectors).

  [See Supported Plug-ins.]

Administration

Routing Director Release 2.6.0 provides the following administration features to manage users, sites, and organizations:

• Accountability in access control profiles—Routing Director displays the following additional details about each access control profiles to ensure accountability in the profile usage:

  • Creator of the profile.

  • Current owner of the profile.

  • Date and time the profile was last modified.

  • Network Admin users to whom the profile is assigned.

  [See About the Access Control Profiles Page.]

• Use RADIUS configuration existing on a device for authentication—Routing Director allows you to use existing RADIUS settings on devices during the onboarding process. Enable the Configure RADIUS check box on the Organization Settings page (Settings Menu > System Settings) for Routing Director to configure RADIUS on the device.

  If the checkbox is cleared, the device’s existing RADIUS configuration is retained and used for authentication while connecting with Routing Director.

  [See Manage RADIUS Server Configuration.]

• Check cluster health from the Routing Director GUI—Use the Health Checks page (Settings > Health Checks) to view the overall health status of the Routing Director cluster. On this page, you can view the result, detailed status output, and timestamp of the most recent request deployment health-check command. The GUI output matches the CLI output of the cluster health-check command.

  [See About the Health Check Page.]

Juniper Routing Director Installation

Juniper Routing Director Release 2.6.0 provides the following installation-related features:

• Install a three-node cluster—You can install Routing Director on a cluster of three virtual machines (VMs). The three node VMs function as both primary and worker nodes. The cluster creation and deployment process is the same as that of a four-node cluster.

  The node VMs can be on the same subnet or on different subnets. If the virtual IP (VIP) addresses are on different subnets from the cluster nodes, you must configure BGP peering between each cluster node and the respective upstream gateway top-of-rack (ToR) router as well as between the routers.

  The three-node cluster remains functional when a single node fails and when the maximum round trip latency between nodes is less than 25 ms. To ensure server high-availability, create each node on a different hypervisor server.

  You cannot upgrade an older release of Routing Director to a three-node cluster.

  [See Routing Director System Requirements, Prepare the Cluster Nodes, and Deploy the Cluster.]

• Upgrade Routing Director using the .img file—Upgrade your existing Release 2.5.0 installation to Release 2.6.0 using the upgrade_routing-director-release-build-ID.img disk image file in addition to the .tgz compressed archive file.

  The .img file is larger is size than the .tgz file. However, to use the .tgz file, you must extract the contents of the file, which eventually uses up more storage.

  [See Upgrade Routing Director.]

Beta Features

Juniper Routing Director Release 2.6.0 provides Beta support for the following features:

• Device Support—You can onboard EX4400 virtual chassis to Routing Director and perform basic device management functions (view inventory, view configuration, back up configuration, and reboot device).

• Stitch services in Routing Director—Use Routing Director to connect or stitch two distinct services provisioned using different technologies such as EVPN, L3VPN, VPWS, and L2 Circuit for centralized policy enforcement.

  Using Routing Director, configure a logical tunnel interface to bridge two services.

  [See Service Stitching Overview.]

• Manage brownfield services using Routing Director—Use Routing Director to manage and orchestrate brownfield services. To manage and orchestrate a brownfield service, you must configure the service in Routing Director so that the service configuration is added to the paragon-service-orchestration group and then delete the existing service configuration on the devices.

  Routing Director provides pinned reservation option for both resources (such as, route distinguishers, VLAN IDs, logical interfaces, and so on) and services which lets you reserve resources for migrating brownfield services and also constrain services to use the reserved resources. In addition to brownfield service migration, you can also reserve resources for a particular service (non-brownfield) or customer.

  [See Migrate a Brownfield Service to Routing Director.]

• Execute dry run on service instances—Use the Dry run with Validation option on a service instance to reserve resources required for the service and the validate the configuration generated for the service without changing the current configuration on the device.

  [See About the Service Instance Page.

• Support for VLAN-based and VLAN-aware EVPN service types—Routing Director supports the following EVPN service types for the E-LAN EVPN CSM service:

  • vlan-based—This service type supports a one-to-one mapping of a single broadcast domain to a single bridge domain. Each VLAN is mapped to a single EVPN instance, resulting in a separate bridge table for each VLAN.

  • vlan-aware—This service type supports multiple broadcast domains to map to a single bridge domain. Multiple VLANs are mapped to a single EVPN instance and share the same bridge table in the MAC-VRF table.

  [See Add an EVPN or EVPN-VPWS Service Instance.]

• Configure an IRB interface for L3VPN services—You can configure an IRB interface for L3VPN services for the following scenarios:

  • L3VPN with EVPN having regular untagged interfaces with OSPF as PE-CE protocol and insights.

  • L3VPN with EVPN having regular untagged interfaces with BGP as PE-CE protocol and insights.

  • L3VPN with EVPN having interfaces in VLAN mode with OSPF as PE-CE protocol and insights.

  • L3VPN with EVPN having interfaces in VLAN mode with BGP as PE-CE protocol and insights.

  [See Add L3VPN Service Site Details.]

• Upload a customized service design—Upload customized service designs to Routing Director by using the service orchestration cMGD CLI.

  Note:

  To create and customize service designs, contact Juniper Networks Professional Services.

  You can view the uploaded service designs on the Service Designs page (Orchestration > Service > Service Catalog) and use them to provision corresponding services in the network.

  [See Upload a Customized Service Design.]

• Centralized plug-in inventory management—Manage and view all available Plug-in versions on the Plugin Inventory page (Inventory > Active Assurance > Plugin Inventory).

  You can upload Plug-ins as .nap files, which contain the necessary binary files and dependencies for Test Agents to run measurements. From the Plugin Inventory page, you can mark specific Plug-in versions as active, ensuring optimal functionality and version control for your network measurements.

  [See About the Plugin Inventory Page.]