Stupid Arista Question: Syncing Configs

[hrmgamer]

Hi all

I'm chasing some advice on how to arrange and manage some switches in the homelab.

I'm finally getting around to fixing my networking after having a my 'new' switches sitting on the shelf for a couple of years. As a background I've got:
- 2x Arista 7050T-64
- 2x Brocade ICX6450 (running switch firmware as I want all the processing on the Aristas, feel free to say I'm being silly)
- 4x Ruckus R720 (Unleashed, will get more when I get the chance)
- i3 box running PFSense
- bunch of Dell R710/R720/R730s servers running Hyper-V
- and about to commission an absurd number of VLANs

I'm essentially planning on the Brocade/Ruckus devices kicking the inter-VLAN traffic up to the Aristas with only external traffic going out to PFSense. Being lazy as I am---and to make sure VLANs/ACLs/etc. don't end up becoming inconsistent----I'd like to make a change to a config change on one Arista have it replicated to the other Arista. Coming from Cisco stacked switches I assumed this would be simple then realised I was silly in overlooking the Aristas don't stack. I also couldn't find anything in the Arista manual for syncing things like configs.

Long term I'm planning to get things like 802.1x deployed so ideally any solution would do more than VLANs and ACLs, but those two would probably be what gets changed the most so that's what's most important.

I'm hoping I've just overlooked something obvious, but I'm also happy to entertain other ideas on how this should be done. I half toyed with going down the openflow path, but that was after I had bought everything and setting it up only for the Aristas seemed...overkill.

Thanks for the suggestions
HRMGamer

 

[Railgun]

Running mlag?

You could write a script to copy the config to the other switch on save. Do it in a config session as I believe it’s easier to separate all the pending config changes but I don’t use that feature so it may not be handy.

 

[vangoose]

VARP?

 

[hrmgamer]

Running mlag?

You could write a script to copy the config to the other switch on save. Do it in a config session as I believe it’s easier to separate all the pending config changes but I don’t use that feature so it may not be handy.

Yep, I was planning on MLAG (unless there is a reason I shouldn't use it). Assuming I've understood/remembering correctly how MLAG works I'll get effective cross chassis layer 2. But given that the VLANs will exist on both switches I'll need to keep the VLAN and ACL rules consistent between them.

Where do you run the script from? On the 'primary' Arista?

VARP?

I forgot about VARP, thanks! But while that will simplify stuff a lot, I didn't see anything about syncing ACLs for it. So even if both switches now have shared VIPs in each VLAN I'll still need to somehow synchronise the ACLs defining what traffic can go between each one? Not to mention things like the broadcast forwarding for DHCP/mdns (Apple is frustrating at times)/etc.

 

[Railgun]

Where do you run the script from? On the 'primary' Arista?

In this case, yes. You could in theory create an alias command that calls the script. So instead of wr or write memory, do something like "save" (which isn't a command that currently exists) which does a write memory as well as copies the newly saved startup config over to the secondary switch, logs into that switch and does a copy start run.

Alternatively, you could use ansible.

 

[hrmgamer]

Hmmm, ansible is a good idea

And thanks for the script alias idea!