SONiC testbed management infrastructure

• The SONiC testbed consists of multiple interrelated configuration files that are difficult and error-prone edit manually.
• They are not frequently modified and only handful of persons like owners/admin has authority to modify them. But creating the initial setup or retrieving a broken setup is more challenging task for them.
• User scripts runs inside the docker container loads and access these files, and if the container is corrupted or crashed these files will be lost and will be difficult to get back easily. This will be challenging time for the user who doesn’t have the knowledge of interrelationship of the files.

So how do we onboard engineer to write tests?

• Keep the testbed files in the separate repository outside the SONiC docker image.
• Provision the engineers to keep the code in their local machine and mount them while loading the docker container. So, code will be in the local directory and won’t get lost if the container is wrecked.
• Give the engineer a script to build the testbed from the stored files in the repository.

Workflows

Before going to the work flows please look into the basic docker commands to create the sonic-mgmt environment. Also before getting invloved into any of the workflow1 or workflow2 please make sure that you have loaded the sonic docker image to be executed using locker load command. sudo docker load -i docker-sonic-mgmt

workflow1

• Fork the sonic-mgmt(https://github.com/Azure/sonic-mgmt.git) repo.
  • Make sure you clone the forked version from your repo
    • Ex: git clone https://github.com/ANISH-GOTTAPU/sonic-mgmt
• load the docker image such that it mounts sonic-mgmt inside the container.
  • Make sure the path is matching the criteria
  • sudo docker run -it --name sonic --privileged -v /home/ubuntu/sonic-mgmt/:/var/johnar/sonic-mgmt --user johnar:gjohnar docker-sonic-mgmt
• Inside the container clone sonic-testbed-manager.
  • Fork the sonic-testbed-manager(https://github.com/ANISH-GOTTAPU/sonic-testbed-manager)
  • update the files accordingly in your forked repo as per testbed
  • Now do a git clone of updated forked repo inside the container
    • Ex:- git clone https://github.com/ANISH-GOTTAPU/sonic-testbed-manager
• Run the script dev-env.sh form the directory /var/johnar/sonic-testbed-manager/ixia-calbases-lab
  • cd /var/johnar/sonic-testbed-manager/ixia-calbases-lab
  • sh ./dev-env.sh
• Run the test
  • cd ~/sonic-mgmt/tests/
  • Add environment variables
    • export ANSIBLE_CONFIG=../ansible
    • export ANSIBLE_LIBRARY=../ansible
  • py.test --inventory ../ansible/ixia-sonic --host-pattern sonic-s6100-dut --testbed vms-ixia-sonic --testbed_file ../ansible/testbed.csv --show-capture=stdout --log-cli-level info --showlocals -ra --allow_recover --skip_sanity --disable_loganalyzer ixia/bgp/test_bgp_community.py
• In this workflow your test script or code will remain intact even if docker image is destroyed unintentionally since you are actually keeping the code in the (mounted) local directory.

workflow2

• Simply load the docker image no mounts of local folders are required.
  • sudo docker run -it --name sonic docker-sonic-mgmt
• Inside the container clone the forked version of sonic-mgmt(https://github.com/Azure/sonic-mgmt.git)
  • Ex: git clone https://github.com/ANISH-GOTTAPU/sonic-mgmt
• Inside the container clone sonic-testbed-manager.
  • Fork the sonic-testbed-manager(https://github.com/ANISH-GOTTAPU/sonic-testbed-manager)
  • update the files accordingly in your forked repo as per the testbed.
  • Now do a git clone of updated forked repo inside the container
    • Ex:- git clone https://github.com/ANISH-GOTTAPU/sonic-testbed-manager
• Run the script dev-env.sh form the directory /var/johnar/sonic-testbed-manager/ixia-calbases-lab
  • cd /var/johnar/sonic-testbed-manager/ixia-calbases-lab
  • sh ./dev-env.sh
• Run the test
  • cd ~/sonic-mgmt/tests/
  • Add environment variables
    • export ANSIBLE_CONFIG=../ansible
    • export ANSIBLE_LIBRARY=../ansible
  • py.test --inventory ../ansible/ixia-sonic --host-pattern sonic-s6100-dut --testbed vms-ixia-sonic --testbed_file ../ansible/testbed.csv --show-capture=stdout --log-cli-level info --showlocals -ra --allow_recover --skip_sanity --disable_loganalyzer ixia/bgp/test_bgp_community.py
• In this workflow if you make certain local change inside the folder ~/sonic-mgmt/ that will not be saved if the container got corrupted somehow.