In this chapter, we will outline how to automate Arista switches in a typical data center environment in a leaf-spine architecture. We will explore how to interact with Arista devices using Ansible, and how to deploy virtual local area networks (VLANs) and virtual extensible LANs (VXLANs) in a Border Gateway Protocol/Ethernet virtual private network (BGP/EVPN) setup on the Arista switches using various Ansible modules. We will base our illustration on the following sample network diagram of a basic leaf-spine data center network (DCN):
The following table outlines the devices in our sample topology and their respective management internet protocols (IPs):
Device |
Role |
Vendor |
Management (MGMT) Port |
MGMT IP |
Spine01 |
Spine Switch |
Arista vEOS 4.20 |
Management1 |
172.20.1.35 |
Spine02 |
Spine Switch |
Arista... |