Evolving CERN’s Network Configuration Management System

Abstract

CERN’s networks comprise several thousands network devices from multiple vendors and from different generations, fulfilling various purposes (campus network, data centre network, and dedicated networks for the LHC accelerator and experiments control). To ensure the reliability of the networks, the IT Communication Systems group has developed an in-house, Perl-based software called “cfmgr”, capable of deriving and enforcing the appropriate configuration on all these network devices, based on information from a central network database. Due to the decrease in popularity of the technologies it relies upon, maintaining and expanding the current network configuration management system has become increasingly challenging. Hence, we have evaluated the functionality of various open-source network configuration tools, in view of leveraging them for evolving the cfmgr platform. We will present the result of this evaluation, as well as the plan for evolving CERN’s network configuration management system by decoupling the configuration generation (CERN specific) from the configuration enforcement (generic problem, partially addressed by vendor or community Python based libraries).