software engineer standing beside server racksPhoto by Christina Morillo on <a href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/software-engineer-standing-beside-server-racks-1181354/" rel="nofollow">Pexels.com</a>

Cumulus 3.6 is here!

They have released their latest version of Cumulus Linux, 3.6 and it has a few exciting new features! With the release of Cumulus 3.6 this is another step in making the network more open.

New Features

Facebook and Cumulus Voyager
Facebook and Cumulus Voyager

In the new Cumulus release they are finally able to do some important features that have been available on other platforms for quite a while. They’re also able to bring some new features in from other areas of Linux and utilized them in networking.

Voyager

With the release of Cumulus 3.6 they are using something called Voyager. Voyager allows cumulus to use DWDM (Multiplexing Fiber) with routing and switching. Before Cumulus 3.6 was released the costs for routing and switching equipment that could do this was rather steep.

VRF route leaking

With Cumulus 3.6 we finally see something called route-leaking as a feature in the software. What route leaking allows is for VRF (Virtual Routing and Forwarding) instances to share routes between the different virtual routers. This allows a Cumulus switch to compete with vendors like Cisco in Juniper in the virtual router field. What has allowed Cumulus to do this, is forking what was called quagga into a new project called FRR. The use of FRR has also allowed Cumulus to do something on the new release called Policy-based routing.

FRR Logo
FRR Logo

Policy Based Routing

What this is enables is to route traffic depending on what type of traffic it is. This can be accomplished through filtering of traffic. This allows you to bypass the traditional routing table and have specific routes for specific application types. The way that Cumulus is able to do this is by using FRR and VRFs inside of the FRR protocol.

The link to Cumulus is here: https://cumulusnetworks.com/

Contributing:

As always if you know of something that I’ve left out or if you have any suggestions drop me a comment and I will modify this post as to help the next person that stumbles across this blog.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.