Experiment with SONiC using Hedgehog Virtual Lab

Want to experiment with the idea of running SONiC in your distributed cloud, but don’t want to commit to purchasing hardware?  You can start with the Hedgehog Virtual Lab.  Just visit https://githedgehog.com and click the DOWNLOAD button.  From there you can install the Hedgehog Virtual Lab in less time than it takes to brew a good pot of coffee.  

Hedgehog Virtual Lab is a great way to understand how Hedgehog Open Network Fabric powered by SONiC works.  You can experiment with our API, test our capabilities, and even look under the hood to see how we have implemented the fabric.  We can pretty much guarantee that experimenting with the Hedgehog Virtual Lab will be easier and more effective than trying to build your own SONiC virtual testbed from the Github repository.  

By default, the Hedgehog software appliance installs VLAB in a clos topology with 2 spines, 2 MCLAG leafs, 1 non-MCLAG leaf, 6 servers and 1 Hedgehog control nodes.  The switches are SONiC Virtual Switch (VS) nodes, and the servers are QEMU/KVM nodes. You can also choose to run the VLAB in a collapsed core topology for smaller edge computing scenarios.  

To run the default spine-leaf topology you’ll need a server or virtual machine with 38 vCPUs, 36352 MB, 410 GB disk.  The collapsed core topology is of course a smaller footprint requiring 22 vCPUs, 19456 MB, 240 GB disk.  You can create your own topologies as well.  We’ve given you an API to do this and some metrics to plan for the resources you’ll need to run your own custom VLAB topology.     

After you have installed the lab and brewed your coffee, you can start running some lab exercises.  We recommend you experiment by creating some Hedgehog Virtual Private Cloud instances the same way you would with AWS Virtual Private Cloud.   

You can read more about Hedgehog Virtual Lab in our documentation.