VPP Configuration – Part2
About this series
I use VPP - Vector Packet Processor - extensively at IPng Networks. Earlier this year, the VPP community merged the Linux Control Plane plugin. I wrote about its deployment to both regular servers like the Supermicro routers that run on our AS8298, as well as virtual machines running in KVM/Qemu.
Now that I’ve been running VPP in production for about half a year, I can’t help but notice one specific
drawback: VPP is a programmable dataplane, and by design it does not include any configuration or
controlplane management stack. It’s meant to be integrated into a full stack by operators. For end-users,
this unfortunately means that typing on the CLI won’t persist any configuration, and if VPP is restarted,
it will not pick up where it left off. There’s one developer convenience in the form of the exec
command-line (and startup.conf!) option, which will read a file and apply the contents to the CLI line
by line. However, if any typo is made in the file, processing immediately stops. It’s meant as a convenience
for VPP developers, and is certainly not a useful configuration method for all but the simplest topologies.
Luckily, VPP comes Continue reading
