IxNetwork : Using IxNetwork NextGEN Framework.

Ixia is a big player in network traffic generator platforms market. Almost all the vendor use Ixia extensively to test and replicate customer scenario on their equipment. It has many variants and I am planning to discuss few major variants like IxNetwork, IxExplorer, IxLoad in my upcoming blogs.

In this blog I will be talking about IxNetwork and its NextGen Framework.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            As We know  that IxNetwork is used as traffic generator but this is not the only service provided by it, it can also be used as protocol and solution testing platform. With the help of IxNetwork you can have  many different scenarios implemented like OSPF/MPLS/BGP/GRE/PTP/VPLS/PPPOE etc. I will try to cover few of the these deployments in my blogs.

Lets starts with adding chassis and ports to our IxNetwork application. This is two step process explained below.

STEP 1 : Add Ixia chassis to the IxNetwork application.

You will have to have a host PC which has the reachability to Ixia chassis. On this PC you will have IxNetwork application installed. Once you start IxNetwork you will see following screen.

Ixia1
IxNetwork1

 

To add a chassis to the IxNetwork application you need to perform following steps.Click on Add ports you will get following screen.

IxNetwork

Click on Add Chassis and you will get following window to add chassis IP address there. Once the IP address is provided IxNetwork will try to connect with chassis. If the reachability is fine then it will list all the cards and ports available on the chassis.

IxNetwork
IxNetwork3

 

After you press OK following screen will be seen.

STEP 2: Adding Ixia ports to IxNetwork.

This shows all the ports and chassis available on the Ixia chassis. Now from this chassis you will have your DUT (device under test) connected. For example I have my ASR903 connected to the card 6 port 3 and port 5 in following manner.

IXIA-CARD6-PORT3———ASR903——-IXIA-CARD6-PORT5

 

IxNetwork4
IxNetwork4

 

You can expand the card to make ports visible and click on Add Ports to add it to your topology.

In next blog I am going to show how to configure ports to enable communications between the DUT and Ixia.

Please stay tuned for more. Thank You.

 

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