Juniper Apstra

The Apstra software is installed as one or a set of virtual machines (VMs) to connect and manage devices via agents installed on or off the devices.

You can design your rack types and fabric network using Apstra templates. Details such as single/dual-homing of servers, collapsed/3-stage/5-stage style of fabric, Ethernet VPN (EVPN)/IP fabric, and IPv4/IPv6 underlay can be specified as part of the template type and options. Once the fabric template is completed, it can be instantiated into blueprints, each representing an actual physical network. The allocation of the managed devices and network resources (“build phase”) is done within the blueprints. As the blueprint is built, Apstra automatically produces the necessary configuration for devices, providing an abstraction layer across vendors. Apstra provides continuous validation against intent and policy assurance, and it identifies configuration drift in real time, confirming that security policies are enforced as intended. Once the user commits the changes, the incremental configuration is pushed to the Juniper, Cisco, Arista, or Dell-EMC devices.

It uses repeatable blueprints to maintain consistency, improve reliability, and boost speed. Implement changes quickly and efficiently across multiple vendors and configurations with change control, validation, and compliance auditing. Significantly improve service delivery times, reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), and shorten maintenance windows.

Apstra Use Cases:

• Data center network lifecycle management. This use case is enabled by design tools, configuration management, and advanced troubleshooting capabilities that work across any network topology and a variety of vendor platforms.
• Data center network operational visualization and monitoring with intent-based analytics
• Data center network operating system upgrade management
• Protection from configuration and change management errors with data center configuration rollback tools
• Unified lifecycle management of data centers from a single centralized tool
• Data center network outage root-cause analysis for accelerated MTTR
• Data center interconnect (DCI) lifecycle management
• Data center security policy evaluation and assurance
• Configuration and event correlation between VMware environments and data center networks
• Data center network capacity planning and utilization monitoring.

Key Features:

• Intent-based automation and continuous Day 0 – Day 2+ validation
• Multivendor support
• Advanced telemetry, policy assurance, and a single source of truth
• Scalability
• Intent Time Voyager rollback

Juniper Apstra offers vendor-agnostic intent based networking solutions.With Apstra you can accelerate deployment while keeping consistency across your network.Apstra translates business intent and technical objectives to essential policy and device-specific configuration, and it continuously self-validates and resolves issues to assure compliance. You specify the “what” (network topology, VLANs, desired capacity, redundancy requirements, access rules, and more), and Apstra delivers the “how.”

Microsoft Technology:Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Hyper-V(Windows Server 2016 Datacenter Edition).

Users with the administrator role can create, clone, edit and delete user roles (which are assigned to user profiles). With Enhanced Role Based Access Control, you can create blueprint-specific roles with very specific privileges allowing limited control to associated users. This allows you to create more hierarchical roles and protect against accidental changes to the network.

Apstra server VM resource requirements are based on the size of the network (blueprint), the scaling of offbox agents and the use of Intent Based Analytics (IBA). If one VM is insufficient for your needs, you can increase capacity with Apstra VM Clusters.