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 2.7.0 extends device LCM to the following platforms:

• Device Support—You can adopt ACX5448 and Nokia 7250 IXR devices to Routing Director. You can perform basic device management functions such as view device in inventory, configuration update using configuration templates, and reboot.

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.

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.

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 2.7.0 provides the following additional service orchestration features:

• Execute dry run on service instances—Use the Dry run with Validation option on a service instance to reserve the necessary resources and validate the generated configuration for the service. Note that this process does not change 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 Service Instance.]

• 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.

  • Multihomed EVPN with Aggregate Ethernet interface port mode.

  • Multihomed EVPN with Aggregate Ethernet interface VLAN mode.

  [See Add EVPN Site and Site Network Access Details and Add EVPN Service Post Update Placements Parameters.]

• 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. This process ensures the service configuration is added to the paragon-service-orchestration group and then you must delete the existing service configuration on the devices.

  Routing Director provides a pinned reservation option for both resources (such as, route distinguishers, VLAN IDs, logical interfaces, and so on) and services. This feature lets you reserve resources for migrating brownfield services and also constrain services to use those 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.]

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 2.7.0 provides the following additional network optimization features:

• Automatic cleanup of LSP event history—You can configure the retention period for LSP event history by specifying the number of days in the LSP Event History field (Settings Menu > System Settings > Organization Settings > Org Table Retention section).

  After you configure the retention period, Routing Director automatically deletes records older than the configured period and retains newer events, thereby reducing storage usage and keeping logs relevant.

  [See Manage Organization Settings.]

• Reprovision tunnels manually —You can manually trigger tunnel reprovisioning to resolve failed tunnels or correct an unexpected path.

  To reprovision tunnels, select one or more tunnels and click Reprovision on the Tunnels tab of the Topology page (Observability > Network > Topology).

  [See About the Tunnels Tab.]

• Align Routing Director with the latest device configurations—Use the Run Device Collection option on the Device tab of the Topology page (Observability > Network > Topology) to get the latest configuration of your network devices.

  Running device collection keeps topology and configuration data accurate for analysis and troubleshooting.

  [See About the Device Tab.]

• Synchronize your network model—You can manually synchronize the network model by using the Sync option on the Advance tab of the Topology Settings page (Observability > Network > Topology > Topology Menu Bar > Settings icon).

  Use this option if the network model audit has unresolved discrepancies or if the information displayed for the model is out of sync. When you synchronize, the network model is repopulated with real-time data gathered during topology acquisition.

  [See View Network Topology Details.]

• Force delete devices and links from your topology—Use the Force Delete option to delete a device or a link that is no longer present in the network but remains in the network model maintained by the topology server (Toposerver). You can force delete one or more devices and links from the Device or Links tabs of the Topology page (Observability > Network > Topology).

  [See About the Device Tab and About the Link Tab.]

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 2.7.0 provides the following additional planner feature:

• Real-time telemetry-driven traffic matrix—Routing Director enables you to create a detailed traffic matrix by capturing real-time tunnel and link utilization telemetry data from your production network.

  Routing Director utilizes this real-time telemetry data to provide a detailed view of traffic patterns across multiple routing scenarios. Understanding telemetry metrics allows you to simulate traffic scenarios and predict how changes will impact network performance.

  Telemetry data is collected for segment routing traffic engineering (SR-TE) and Resource Reservation Protocol-Traffic Engineering (RSVP-TE) tunnels.

• [See Traffic Matrix Workflow.]

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 2.7.0 provides the following additional Active Assurance features:

• Install Test Agent Appliance on Google Cloud Platform—You can install Test Agent Appliance on virtual machines running on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). To install Test Agent Appliance on GCP, you must import the appliance image into Cloud Storage, register the image as a custom Compute Engine image, and launch a VM instance with the required metadata.

  On the GCP GUI, you can also configure network interfaces, firewall rules, and cloud-config metadata to establish a secure connection between the Test Agent Appliance and Routing Director.

  Since the connection is initiated from the GCP towards Routing Director, ensure that firewalls do not block the connection to Routing Director on TCP port 6800.

  [See Install Test Agent Appliance.]

• Visibility into Measurements affected across test agent interfaces and plug-ins—You can view and identify Measurements associated with each interface of Test Agents from the Test-Agent-Name page (Inventory > Active Assurance > Test Agents > Test-Agent-Name) and plug-ins from the Plugin Inventory page (Inventory > Active Assurance > Plugin Inventory > Set Active). This visibility helps you determine which Measurements can be affected when you perform operations on Test Agents and plug-ins.

  [See About the Test Agent-Name Page and About the Plugin Inventory Page.]

• Hide deconfigured Measurements—Select the Hide Deconfigured Measurements check box on the Measurement Explorer page (Observability > Active Assurance > Measurement Explorer) to hide deconfigured Measurements and focus on viewing only the active Measurements.

  Deconfigured measurements are inactive measurements that were previously enabled.

  [See About the Measurement Explorer Page.]

Administration

Routing Director Release 2.7.0 provides the following administration features to manage users, sites, and organizations:

• View network-wide inventory data—On the Inventory page (Inventory > Devices > Network Inventory), in addition to the device inventory, you can view inventory of the following:

  • Software—View the inventory of distinct software installed in your network.

    You can view key details about the software, including the count of end of life (EOL) and nearing EOL software, the number of devices running a specific version (with accompanying device details), and the critical PBN and SIRT advisories issued.

  • Licenses—View the inventory of licenses installed in your network.

    You can view details such as the state of the license, features enabled with the license, devices on which the license is installed, and so on.

  • Features—View the inventory of features used in your network.

    You can view details such as the number of licensed features needed, the number of features enabled, the devices on which the features are active, and the expiration date for feature use.

  • Components—View the inventory of distinct components in your network.

    You can view component details, including the component name, part number, and devices on which they are used, Additionally, you can see the count of components that have reached end of support (EOS) and thoseb nearing EOS.

  [See About the Inventory Page.]

• Check cluster health from the Routing Director GUI—The Routing Director banner displays the overall health status of the Routing Director cluster. Click the Cluster Health button to view the health check result, detailed status output, and a history of the last 10 health checks. Additionally, you can enable GUI notifications for any change in the cluster health status.

  [See About the Health Check Page.]

Juniper Routing Director Installation

Juniper Routing Director Release 2.7.0 provides the following upgrade-related feature:

• Skip the automatic health check when you upgrade Routing Director—Use the skip-health-check option to skip the automatic pre-upgrade cluster health check performed by the request deployment cluster upgrade command. However, you must first verify that the deployment cluster is in good health before proceeding with the upgrade.

  [See Upgrade Routing Director.]

Beta Features

Juniper Routing Director Release 2.7.0 provides Beta support for the following features:

• Device Support—You can onboard EX4400 virtual chassis to Routing Director and perform basic device management functions, such as 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.]

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

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

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

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

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

  [See Add L3VPN Site and Site Network Access Details and Add L3VPN Service Post Update Placements Parameters.]

• 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.]