Tutorial¶

In this tutorial, we are going to create a new site, configure static IP address on the uplinks and deploy a virtual gateway to that site.

Finding the realm and org name¶

When you manage an organization in the SteelConnect CX Manager via a web browser, the URL will look something like this:

https://<REALM_FQDN>/admin/<ORG_SHORT_NAME>

The <REALM_FQDN> and <ORG_SHORT_NAME> will be unique to your setup and you will need these to follow the tutorial.

Create the SteelConnection object¶

Let’s start by creating a SteelConnection object.

Use the steelconnection.SConnect constructor to create the object.
We will assign this new object to the name sc.
We will provide the name of our realm, as well as the username and password we use to login.

import steelconnection
sc = steelconnection.SConnect('myrealm.riverbed.cc', 'admin', 'LetM3in')

Find the ID for our Organization¶

We need to know the Org ID for our Organization. This is easy since we got the Org short name from the SteelConnect CX URL.

The .lookup.org method will return a dictionary representing the org object. That dictionary will include a key called id that holds the org id.

# Replace ORG_SHORT_NAME with your Org's short name.
org_id = sc.lookup.org('ORG_SHORT_NAME')['id']

Create a new site¶

Create a dictionary that represents the site we want to create. At a minimum, we must specify the name, longname, city, and country.

The country specified must be in the standardized two letter format. Here is one source for these codes:

https://www.willmaster.com/blog/misc/country-name-abbreviation.php

If this site will reside in a timezone that is different from the Organization timezone, then you will want to specify the timezone for this site. Timezones must be provided in the same format as the ‘TZ’ column in this list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones#List

Once we have our new site dictionary created, we can send a POST request to the resource ‘/org/<ORG_ID>/sites’.

# Dictionary containing the details for the site to be created:
new_site = {
    'name': 'NYC',
    'city': 'New York',
    'country': 'US',
    'longname': 'New York test lab.',
    'timezone': 'America/New_York',
}

# Created site
resource = '/org/{}/sites'.format(org_id)
site = sc.post(resource, data=new_site)

The post command will return the newly created site, which we have assigned to the name ‘site’.

Set uplink to static IP¶

Here we will set the uplink to use a static IP address. When you create a new site, it new uplink will be created for that site. The site object will include a list of uplinks for that site. Since our site only has one uplink, we can access the uplink ID using index zero.

# Get the uplink ID from the site object, index 0.
uplink_id = site['uplinks'][0]

# Get uplink object from SteelConnect CX Manager.
uplink = sc.get('uplink/' + uplink_id)

Next, we will change the uplink type from ‘dhcp’ to ‘static’, and configure an IP address and default gateway. The change we are making is to the local dictionary object, so we will need to upload the changes to the SteelConnect CX Manager.

# Set uplink to static and define IP addresses.
uplink['type'] = 'static'
uplink['static_ip_v4'] = '172.30.12.249/29'
uplink['static_gw_v4'] = '172.30.12.254'

# Upload modified object to the SCM.
result = sc.put('uplink/' + uplink_id, data=uplink)

Create virtual gateway¶

Let’s create a virtual gateway in the new site we have created. The virtual gateway has the model name ‘yogi’ so we need to specify that model, as well as the site ID.

# Create dictionary with minimum required information.
new_node = { 'site': site['id'], 'model': 'yogi' }

# POST request to SteelConnect CX Manager.
node = sc.post('/org/' + org_id + '/node/virtual/register', data=new_node)

Assign Port to Zone¶

At this point, the virtual gateway should have it’s first network interface assigned to the site uplink. However, no interfaces will be assigned to our LAN zones, so we will do that now, before we generate and download the virtual gateway image.

When we created the new site earlier, a network and a zone were created and associated with this site. We want to configure the zone to the third network interface on our gateway (we are reserving the second interface for other purposes, like as a second uplink or HA control port).

The site has a ‘networks’ key that includes the networks at that site. We need to retreive the network object in order to get the zone ID. The zone will be assigned to the network interface.

# Get network ID from site.
# Since there is only one network associated to this site,
# we take the first one (index zero).
net_id = site['networks'][0]

# Retreive the network from SteelConnect CX Manager.
network = sc.get('/network/' + net_id)

# Get Zone ID from the network object.
zone_id = network['zone']

# Now we can assign this zone to the third network interface.
# First, we get the port ID from the node.
# Note that since indexes start at zero, the third port is at index '2'.
port_id = node['ports'][2]

# Retreive the port from SteelConnect CX Manager.
port = sc.get('/port/' + port_id)

# Set the 'segment' key to the zone ID.
port['segment'] = zone_id

# We can also disable tagging for this port.
# It should already be disabled, since that it the default state.
port['tagged'] = 0

# Upload port to the SteelConnect CX Manager.
result = sc.put('/port/' + port_id, data=port)

Download Virtual Gateway image¶

SteelConnection provides a convenience method to generate and download virtual gateway images.

# Here we specify the destination filename as 'vgw.zip1',
# and the type of hypervisor as 'kvm'.

sc.download_image(save_as='vgw.zip', build='kvm')

Fin¶

This completes the tutorial. I hope this gets you on your way to productive use of SteelConnection.