Cumulus Networks, provider of the Cumulus Linux operating system for
open networking, today announced the launch of Cumulus VX (Virtual
Experience), a free virtual appliance designed to simulate the
traditional Cumulus Networks technology environment. Cumulus VX
provides a new way for data center cloud administrators and network
engineers to learn, prototype and develop open networking concepts at
their own pace, in their own environments. Cumulus VX operates without
the need for a bare metal switch or specialized hardware and runs on all
popular hypervisors.
Cumulus VX lets its users:
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Learn: Cumulus VX will help IT and network professionals become
more familiar with open networking.
-
Test drive: Prospective customers can shorten the evaluation
cycle by testing Cumulus Linux or Cumulus RMP features and
functionalities at their own pace in their own environments, without
needing to invest in hardware.
-
Prototype: Customers can leverage Cumulus VX to experiment and
design rollouts, thus minimizing errors and time to production.
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Develop applications: Customers and partners can leverage
Cumulus VX to develop custom, portable applications that seamlessly
migrate into production Cumulus Linux or Cumulus RMP deployments.
“Open networking is the future. We’re seeing firsthand how organizations
of all sizes benefit from embracing it. With Cumulus VX, we’re removing
all economic and organizational barriers to make it easier than ever for
people who are interested in open networking to try it out,” said Reza
Malekzadeh, Vice President of Business, Cumulus Networks. “In addition,
our partners are excited to have a way to demonstrate the experience of
Cumulus Linux or Cumulus RMP right from their laptops, with no switch
hardware required.”
Cumulus VX can run in a number of virtual environments such as
Virtualbox, KVM, VMware Workstation, VMware Fusion and VMware ESXi as
well as with GNS3 and Vagrant. Lacking data-path acceleration, Cumulus
VX is not intended for production usage but allows networking experts to
test and configure traditional networking protocols like BGP and MLAG as
well as Cumulus Networks-specific technologies such as Prescriptive
Topology Manager (PTM).
Cumulus VX is available for download now on the Cumulus
Networks website. Technical support for Cumulus VX will be available
through Cumulus
Networks Open Networking Community. The Open Networking Community is
an online platform where current and potential customers, partners and
anyone who is “Cumulus Curious” can engage in conversations. Community
members can ask questions around Cumulus VX usage, share product
experiences and learn about events and meetups.
As a complement to the virtual experience with Cumulus VX, Cumulus
Workbench is also available as a way to try Cumulus Linux at a
scheduled time on physical open networking switches in the Cumulus
Networks remote lab.
User Testimonials
“Cumulus VX substantially increases our capability to highlight the
value of Cumulus Linux. We can quickly create everything from simple
single VMs to large multi-node spine and leaf topologies that mimic
customer production deployments without having to reserve hardware.” –
DJ Spry, Principal Engineer, Open Networking, Dell
“Having the ability to spin up virtual Cumulus-powered switches is a
huge boon for automation testing. It's incredibly powerful to be able to
use automation frameworks such as Ansible, Salt, Puppet, or Chef with
Cumulus, and adding Cumulus VX to the mix now enables safer testing of
these automation frameworks before you roll them into production. I use
Ansible, and I can easily test changes to my Ansible playbooks using
Cumulus VX before I run that playbook against production switches.” --
Scott Lowe, Engineering Architect, Networking and Security Business Unit
at VMware
“Open networking simulated in a virtual environment! Cumulus VX brings
us great power in building proof of concepts, testing designs, training
up on new features and easy expansion of Puppet development.” -- Kris
Amundson, Technical Operations Engineer, Puppet
Labs, Inc.
"Rapid development of new functionality is key to introducing customer
innovations and operational enhancements into production environments.
NTT has been developing GoBGP,
a BGP implementation that can work with Cumulus Linux. Without the need
for switch hardware, Cumulus VX accelerates our pace of building,
testing, and implementing GoBGP and other software functionality on top
of Cumulus Linux!" -- Ishida Wataru, Research Engineer, NTT
Software Innovation Center
"Solutions that allow network professionals to get up to speed quickly
and easily see better adoption. With Cumulus VX, all you need is your
laptop! There’s no need to invest time and money into switch hardware
and full-blown PoCs to get started with open networking." -- Matt
Oswalt, Network Engineer, Technology Blogger keepingitclassless.net
“CENGN was extremely happy with the results of the Cumulus VX product
trial in our next generation networking platform, used to accelerate
commercialization of our customer’s products and services. Using Cumulus
VX with Cumulus Networks’ online resources made it easy for our team to
learn how to automate switches without full hardware. The simplicity and
convenience of building an image + script to demonstrate automation
modules to new users would convert even the most devoted CLI fan.” --
Boris Mimeur, Senior Technical Leader, CENGN
“Cumulus VX is a very handy tool that allows us to easily develop Puppet
changes prior to production and test our current Puppet modules when a
new Cumulus Linux release is available. This helps us in minimizing
errors, reducing our time to production with new rollouts!” -- Omar Wit,
Senior System & Network Engineer, Hostnet
“I designed a demonstration package to showcase the ease of deployment
when utilizing Puppet for our sales engineers. The Cumulus VX platform
provides a mobile sandbox our engineers can launch on demand, modify as
needed, and then restore to a predefined state with minimal effort.” --
Richard Kiles, Senior Networking Consultant, GDT
"With Cumulus VX, we were able to test interoperability with other
virtual products effortlessly! The software is an excellent tool to
learn and model Cumulus Networks technology giving me confidence that my
configurations will operate as expected before deployment into
production." -- Sabur Mian, Director, Solution Architecture, HPM
Networks