Abstract
Today’s network industry needs highly qualified engineers to understand, configure, develop and upgrade switches that can build scalable high performance and ultra-low latency networks. This paper describes a new networking laboratory that has been set up to provide hands-on experience on datacenter network switches, such as ARISTA, programming and monitoring the traffic. This paper explains the networking laboratory coursework that students carry out during the course of a semester. The laboratory consists of six hands on experiments on the latest datacenter switches from Arista Networks, two programming assignments that teaches some of the protocols used at data link layer and routing protocols used at the network layer of OSI reference model. The final two laboratory experiments use the Wireshark software tool for traffic monitoring and peeking into details of some of the protocols in TCP/IP such as ARP protocol, Ethernet and so forth. The coursework details include the switch basics, switch hardware, Extensible Operating System (EOS), configuration of Link Aggregation Control Protocol, Multi-chassis Link Aggregation Protocol, Access Control Lists, and Open Short Path First version 2 on Arista switches 7050T-64 and 7048T-4S. The programming tasks cover High-level Data Link Control (HDLC) and Routing Algorithms.
Highlights
Networking industry which is continuously changing, poses numerous challenges for the academic institutions which are trying to keep the students up to date on the new industry trends and innovations providing them enough practical experience
This paper describes a new networking laboratory that has been set up to provide hands-on experience on datacenter network switches, such as ARISTA, programming and monitoring the traffic
The laboratory consists of six hands on experiments on the latest datacenter switches from Arista Networks, two programming assignments that teaches some of the protocols used at data link layer and routing protocols used at the network layer of OSI reference model
Summary
Networking industry which is continuously changing, poses numerous challenges for the academic institutions which are trying to keep the students up to date on the new industry trends and innovations providing them enough practical experience. A laboratory that has been set up, using latest Arista Corporation datacenter network switches is explained. Switches used in such an environment require high performance. Arista switches’ new features such as Extensible Operating System (EOS), Gigabit Ethernet access and deep buffer architecture enables the switches to deliver such high performance and required low latency. The course work introduced in this paper guides us through basic configurations, and features of the datacenter switches. Features such as routing protocols and access control lists are introduced in the experiments. The laboratory experiments include implementation of routing algorithms, important for demonstrating how the IP addressing and routing work, as well as experiments using Wireshark [1] software tool for traffic monitoring and analysis of various protocols
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