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Routing Director Installation Overview

Juniper® Routing Director is a WAN automation platform designed to help enterprise and service provider networks manage increasing traffic demands through automation and streamlined network operations. It provides an experience-driven approach to network management, helping operators deploy, manage, and maintain networks more efficiently.

This guide provides instructions for installing Routing Director and is intended for system administrators and network operators responsible for deploying and managing the Routing Director infrastructure.

Routing Director is deployed as a set of customer-managed virtual machines (VMs) running on supported virtualization platforms. During installation, Routing Director automatically creates and configures a Kubernetes cluster within these VMs. The Kubernetes cluster consists of multiple microservices that communicate through APIs to deliver Routing Director functionality.

Within the cluster, nodes communicate using APIs and SSH. Communication between Routing Director and managed network devices uses industry-standard protocols, including SSH, NETCONF, OpenConfig, and gNMI.

Routing Director supports deployment on a variety of virtualization platforms. Deployments can be hosted on a single hypervisor servers or distributed across multiple hypervisors servers, depending on scalability and availability requirements.

Figure 1 shows a typical Routing Director cluster deployment along with the associated communication protocols. While the illustration shows a single hypervisor server, you can also deploy the cluster on multiple hypervisor servers as well.

Figure 1: Routing Director Deployment Network diagram showing a Routing Director cluster with three primary VMs and one worker VM on a hypervisor, connected through multiple virtual IPs to six PE routers over a management network using NETCONF, SSH, and OpenConfig.

Deployment Shell CLI

Routing Director provides a custom containerized MGD (cMGD) user shell, called Deployment Shell. After a VM is created from the installation bundle, Deployment Shell is available by default and serves as the primary interface for deploying and managing the Routing Director cluster.

Using Deployment Shell, system administrators can:

  • Deploy the Routing Director cluster.

  • Upgrade the software

  • Back up, restore, and edit the cluster configuration.

  • Create and edit users.

  • Configure monitoring with the collection of metrics from different types of sources and forward the collected data to designated sinks or destinations.

  • Retrieve cluster information for troubleshooting.

The Deployment Shell runs on the underlying Linux operating system. When users log in to a Routing Director VM, they are placed in Deployment Shell by default. Exiting Deployment Shell provides access to the Linux root shell.

Note:

Exercise caution while executing commands from the Linux root shell. Commands executed from the Linux root shell are not supported unless explicitly mentioned in the documentation.

Routing Director Installation Workflow

Installing Routing Director consists of the following high-level steps:

  1. Download the Routing Director installation bundle.
  2. Create the required virtual machines using the downloaded OVA file or the extracted OVF and VMDK files.
  3. Configure the node VMs for deployment.
  4. Deploy the Routing Director cluster by using the Deployment Shell CLI.
  5. Access the deployment through the Routing Director Web GUI.

The installation bundle includes all required software components. When VMs are created from the provided OVA, OVF, or VMDK files, Routing Director automatically configures the operating system, required services, networking, time synchronization, and other platform prerequisites. No additional operating system installation or manual infrastructure preparation is required.

Routing Director can also be deployed in air-gapped environments where Internet connectivity is unavailable

An IT or system administrator with permissions to create VMs in the VM deployment platform installs and maintains the Routing Director deployment cluster. The IT or system administrator is responsible for tasks that are related to installation and administration.

What This Guide Covers

This guide explains how to:

  • Install Routing Director on the following VM deployment platforms:

    • KVM

    • Proxmox VE

    • VMware ESXi

    • Amazon Web Services (AWS)

  • Upgrade Routing Director.

  • Update the base OS.

  • Shut down and reboot the cluster.

  • Repair and replace nodes.

  • Back up and restore the cluster configuration.

Related Documentation