Automation for the sake of automating

TL;DR
Automating Mellanox 2010 switches

By now you probably know that HPE has a solution called dHCI. Disaggregated Hyper Converged Infrastructure. It consists of a HPE Alletra storage array and multiple DL-3×0 servers with a pair of Mellanox 2010 Switches. This solution can also be deployed with Aruba top of rack switches and there is some switch automation as long as the whole stack is HPE. I am using Mellanox switches so no switch automation love for me. 🙁

What can be done? This is like a trip down memory lane for me. I started ‘really’ automating when I wrote “Antigua”. Antigua can generate a complete set (regardless of size) of spine/leaf Arista switch configurations with full BGP. Oh, in less than a minute. So it wasn’t a stretch to start this project. I am planning on eliminating the configuration files and have this application push the configurations directly to the switches via the API. If only there was someone out there with a similar system that would like a mad scientist play around and invent. The struggle is real 🙂

UPDATE: The question was asked if the application could generate configuration files for multiple locations. Now you can ‘bulk import’ a super comma separated variable file and you can define as many site pairs as desired. Still configuration file you need to secure copy to the switch. If that doesn’t excite you, you can always go back to your trusty console cable.

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