Vyatta documentation

Learn how to install, configure, and operate the Vyatta Network Operating System (Vyatta NOS) and Orchestrator, which help drive our virtual networking and physical platforms portfolio.

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Control plane

The control plane defines the topology of a network and is responsible for establishing links between routers and for exchanging protocol information. A variety of routing protocols are used to define connections and manage their behavior.

Route broker

The route broker is a daemon that  ensures eventual consistency is achieved between the control plane, kernel and dataplane FIB.

This daemon is able to track the routing information given to each of the interested parties. The daemon uses a pull model from the clients and coalesces updates to the routing information it is tracking for each client.

The dataplane connects to this broker to synchronize routing state when it starts up. 

Vplaned

Vplaned is a daemon that manages interaction with the dataplane.

The dataplane has a requirement for fast restart and hot-plug support. Vplaned provides an intermediate processing stage for netlink and configuration commands and supports these behaviors for the dataplane.

Both netlink and configuration active commands are stored in vplaned. On restart of the dataplane these active commands can be replayed to the dataplane. Additionally, hot-plug interfaces can be supported in the same fashion. 

The Vplaned process consists of a netlink message listener to relay state programmed into the Linux kernel and a configuration relay mechanism for configuration changes which are not mirrored in the kernel. Vplaned also has the ability to dispatch a cached version of this information to the dataplane if it restarts. ZMQ is used to send all of this information to the dataplane. 

The format of configuration commands sent to vplaned is JSON with either a base64 protobuf blob or text over a ZMQ socket. This is for compatibility when creating the protobuf based configuration protocol.