Setting up your environment

All of these exercises are designed to be performed on an Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy) box.

If you have an Ubuntu 22.04 box on which you have sudo or root access, you can feel free to use that.
If you do not, a Vagrantfile is provided to setup a basic Ubuntu 22.04 box for you in the the steps below.

Install Libvirt and Vagrant

You will need to install Libvirt and Vagrant.

Create a Vagrant Directory

To get started create a directory for vagrant

$ mkdir vpp-tutorial
$ cd vpp-tutorial

Create a file called Vagrantfile with the following contents:

# -*- mode: ruby -*-
# vi: set ft=ruby :

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|

  config.vm.box = "generic/ubuntu2204"

  vmcpu=(ENV['VPP_VAGRANT_VMCPU'] || 2)
  vmram=(ENV['VPP_VAGRANT_VMRAM'] || 4096)

  config.ssh.forward_agent = true

  config.vm.provider "libvirt" do |vb|
      vb.memory = "#{vmram}"
      vb.cpus = "#{vmcpu}"
  end
end

Running Vagrant

VPP runs in userspace. In a production environment you will often run it with DPDK to connect to real NICs or vhost to connect to VMs.mIn those circumstances you usually run a single instance of VPP.

For purposes of this tutorial, it is going to be extremely useful to run multiple instances of vpp, and connect them to each other to form a topology. Fortunately, VPP supports this.

When running multiple VPP instances, each instance needs to have specified a 'name' or 'prefix'. In the example below, the 'name' or 'prefix' is "vpp1". Note that only one instance can use the dpdk plugin, since this plugin is trying to acquire a lock on a file.

Setting up VPP environment with Vagrant

After setting up Vagrant, use these commands on your Vagrant directory to boot the VM:

$ vagrant up
$ vagrant ssh
$ sudo bash
# apt-get update
# reboot -n
$ # Wait for the VM to reboot
$ vagrant ssh

Install VPP

Now that the VM is updated, we will install the VPP packages.

For more on installing VPP please refer to Downloading and Installing VPP.

For this tutorial we will install VPP by modifying the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/99fd.io.list.

We write this file with the following contents:

$ sudo bash
# echo "deb https://packagecloud.io/fdio/release/ubuntu jammy main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/99fd.io.list
#

Get the key.

# curl -L https://packagecloud.io/fdio/release/gpgkey | sudo apt-key add -
#

Then execute the following commands.

# apt-get update
# apt-get install vpp vpp-plugin-core vpp-plugin-dpdk
#

Stop VPP for this tutorial. We will be creating our own instances of VPP.

# service vpp stop
#

Create some startup files

We will create some startup files for the use of this tutorial. Typically you will modify the startup.conf file found in /etc/vpp/startup.conf. For more information on this file refer to Configuration Reference.

When running multiple VPP instances, each instance needs to have specified a 'name' or 'prefix'. In the example below, the 'name' or 'prefix' is "vpp1". Note that only one instance can use the dpdk plugin, since this plugin is trying to acquire a lock on a file. These startup files we create will disable the dpdk plugin.

Also in our startup files notice api-segment. api-segment {prefix vpp1} tells FD.io VPP how to name the files in /dev/shm/ for your VPP instance differently from the default. unix {cli-listen /run/vpp/cli-vpp1.sock} tells vpp to use a non-default socket file when being addressed by vppctl.

Now create 2 files named startup1.conf and startup2.conf with the following content. These files can be located anywhere. We specify the location when we start VPP.

startup1.conf:

unix {cli-listen /run/vpp/cli-vpp1.sock}
api-segment { prefix vpp1 }
plugins { plugin dpdk_plugin.so { disable } }

startup2.conf:

unix {cli-listen /run/vpp/cli-vpp2.sock}
api-segment { prefix vpp2 }
plugins { plugin dpdk_plugin.so { disable } }