VyOS Networks Blog

Building an open source network OS for the people, together.

VyOS Project April 2020 Update

Daniil Baturin
Posted 3 May, 2020

Hello Community!

Here is the April update from the VyOS project.

Despite the global crisis, we are working on the project and expanding our services. There’s some good progress towards the future 1.3 release and more work on the 1.2 LTS branch.

There are also multiple new partnerships with hardware manufacturers and cloud providers that will bring VyOS to more users and expand the range of supported platforms.

We are grateful to all community members who participate, to people who support us on Patreon, and to customers who trust VyOS and use our services!

COVID-19 crisis hits open-source too

This is a hard time for everyone, and many people are worried that the global crisis will have a long-lasting negative effect on free and open-source software as well. The TOR project had to lay off one-third of its employees, there has been uncertainty over the next free software release of Qt, and there’s a broad concern that companies will reduce support for projects that don’t generate revenue for them.

Many other projects have to rely on people’s goodwill, and many report that donations are drying up. If you are using a project that doesn’t have any revenue streams (and we all are using them!), consider supporting them if you can.

VyOS Partnerships

April was really productive in terms of new partnerships as well as expanding existing ones.

As you probably know, we already have official support and partnerships with DellEMC, EdgeCore, and Nutanix and we are constantly working towards expanding these partnerships:

  • Nutanix. Recently we have announced that we are working with the Nutanix team to bring VyOS Blueprints to Nutanix Calm and to Nutanix Marketplace so people who use Nutanix Enterprise Cloud can deploy and scale VyOS faster and easier in a variety of use case scenarios.
  • DellEMC.  We already support the Virtual Edge Platform (both 1400 and 4600) and now we are working on support for Dell Edge Gateways for IoT. Initially, we plan to support Dell Edge Gateway 3002 and later add support for Edge Gateway 5000 and New Edge Gateway 5100 as well.
  • EdgeCore. We continue to expand support for SAF series appliances. In addition to already fully supported SAF51001I, SAF5101I and SAF51015I, we are working on support for SAF4100I which comes with Marvell 88E6190X Ethernet Switch and SAF4101I that comes with same switch chip but also supports PoE (4 PoE PSE ports; 2 x 802.3at or 4 x 802.3af).

 Lanner inc. is a well-known manufacturer of high quality network hardware, and VyOS always worked well on their appliances. Now they reached out to us for an official partnership, and we are proud and grateful to them.
We are already working with the Lanner team to confirm there are no hardware support issues  and prepare a HCL. Soon you will be able to buy Lanner hardware with preinstalled VyOS — stay tuned for updates.

Last but not least, we are working with the Oracle Cloud Marketplace team to officially bring VyOS to OCI. It's already possible to run VyOS there, so making it official and easy to deploy is the logical next step.
But that is not all! We are also discussing the possibility to create a validated VyOS image for OracleVM and ultimately bring VyOS to the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance. Hopefully, soon all OCI and OPCA users will be able to easily use VyOS in their environments

VyOS and TSANet

Interoperability issues can be a real nightmare for the user. We all have heard of and seen cases of different vendors blaming the issue on each other, while the user is left with a broken system and no clear way out of that situation.

TSANet is a non-profit organization that aims to make cross-vendor support easier. If you haven’t heard about it yet, please check out this video. Currently, we only have established relationships with Nutanix and VMware, but new partnerships are on the way.

So what does it mean for you?

If you have any issues with VyOS on any of these platforms, you only need to contact their vendor, and they will escalate the issue to the VyOS support team if necessary, and work together with us to find a solution. This way you will only need to communicate with one support team directly and focus on your business rather than keeping vendor support teams in sync.

Community-developed Web GUI for VyOS

You may remember that a while ago we added an HTTP API to VyOS. The 1.2.x LTS version has a limited API so far, while active development is going on in the 1.3 branch. However, an API is merely a means to an end. The possibilities are broad: you can make modules for orchestration tools, desktop and mobile apps, and web apps for managing VyOS routers… but none of it existed until recently—it takes time to develop the tools.

Web GUI has been one of the most frequently requested features, and now there’s some real progress towards it. Roberto Berto from Under started working on it and has a functional prototype at https://github.com/underinternet/vycenter

We support his effort wholeheartedly and we hope more people from the community will join testing and development.

VyOS 1.2.5 issues with Hyper-V

People have reported issues with booting VMs from the latest .vhdx image. That was caused by a bug in the build scripts that are fixed now. We have published updated images and it deploying VMs from the .vhdx image should work fine now for Gen1 and Gen2 VMs.

Let us know if you run into issues!

If nothing else, you can install VyOS on any platform from the LiveCD ISO as a fallback.

VyOS 1.3 development progress

Dmitriy Eschenko added a CLI for configuring static multicast routes. It’s an important step towards proper support for multicast routing setups.

He also added options for different authentication protocols to the PPPoE server CLI.

Many more interface types support VRF now, including WireGuard. VRF support is more useful where any interface can be associated with a VRF, and that’s good progress towards that goal.

Jernej Jakob added IPv6 support to the OpenVPN CLI. Now you can use IPv6 in all options that were previously limited to IPv4.

Thomas Mangin is working on improving debug logging. With the new approach, all error messages produced by scripts will be properly logged, and there will also be a debug mode, and automatic script crash reports that you can easily attach to Phabricator tasks or support tickets.

Last but not least, many people including Christian Poessinger, Thomas Mangin, Vyacheslav Gletenko, Jernej Jakob, Gabriel Skupien, Runar Borge, and many others have done a lot of work on fixing rough edges, cleaning up the code, and decreasing redundancy. This sounds like a small remark, but in reality, it has been a lot of work, and it’s very important for the future LTS release.

We are heading towards a soft freeze of 1.3 and a stabilization phase. Stay tuned for more updates!

P.S.

We asked Elon Musk about Starlink requirements for routers via this tweet. We doubt he  has seen it, but if you retweet it, maybe he will see it in the end—we'd be really curious to hear his reply. Thanks!

 

If you wish  support VyOS project yo can do it via this two platforms

BECOME A PATRON

BUY ME A COFFEE

or if you prefer bitcoin - 1E7LZdbhRaQRAb4awNiv6VCJ4swT8JpoKa

 

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