IP Fabric v5.0 is here!

More than 40 years ago IPv4 was introduced… It seems such a long time ago, and in the world of IT, 40 years is indeed a long time! 15 years later, with around 25% of IPv4 addresses allocated the IETF started to develop IPv6 to solve the addressing limitation. 

Today we are still heavily relying on IPv4: from our home to the corporate network. At the same time, there is a growing adoption of IPv6.

It’s hard to say when IPv4 will disappear, or if it will, one thing we can say is that we are entering a phase where IPv6 will coexist with IPv4.  

We saw this growing demand from our customers, partners, and more generally from the markets where we operate, to support IPv6 as part of our Automated Network Assurance Platform. 

IP Fabric v4.0 was released back in October 2021 and unlike IPv4 which went quickly from IPv4 to IPv6 (What Happened to IPv5?), we are excited to announce the release of IP Fabric v5.0, where we will bring, amongst other great features, support for IPv6. 

What’s new in IP Fabric v5.0? 

IPv6 

For a while, we had basic support of IPv6 for OSPFv3. To properly support IPv6, we had to change the legacy properties in our model. This means IPv6 information present in older snapshots will no longer be supported. 

Information collected about IPv6 is now available in a number of existing tables and new dedicated ones have been created, for example: 

• Cumulative IPv6 routing table 
• IPv6 Neighbor Discovery 
• IPv6 Tunnels 
• IPv6 Network users, hosts, and endpoints 

In the coming releases, we will further develop our support of IPv6 in our security model and in the Path Lookup.  

Note: The discovery of network devices is done via IPv4 only, pure IPv6 discovery is not yet supported. 

Cloud Security 

Public or Private Cloud routers (AWS VPC, Azure VNet, VMware NSX, ACI…) require a different approach when handling security.  

With the release v4.0 of IP Fabric, we changed the security model to prepare exactly for this! Without going into too much detail – there will be a future blog on this subject – IP Fabric supports: 

• Azure Network Security Groups 
• AWS Network ACLs & Security Groups 
• ACI information on tenants, contexts, applications, endpoints, bridge domains, and Contracts are now collected via Cisco APIC. You will need to set the details of the APIC in the Vendors API settings. 
• NSX-T security is coming soon 

Adding the cloud security support allows you to quickly visualize where a flow transiting to a Cloud, is being dropped or why an end user is complaining about a connectivity issue, in one single pane of glass.  

Additional Support 

DNS Basic configuration & DNS Resolver configuration 

How to ensure you have consistent DNS settings on every network device? IP Fabric gathers details about DNS configuration and DNS resolver settings: 

• IP addresses of DNS servers used to query domain names & IPs (reverse lookup). Both IPv4 and IPv6 are supported 
• Search Domains - set of domains to be added to a hostname that couldn’t be resolved 
• Retry & Timeout 

• Protocols (optional) - which protocols are available to query DNS servers. 

DHCP servers and relays support 

IP Fabric now collects information about DHCP Servers used for relay, option82 information, and statistics (per device or per interface - depending on vendor/family). 

DHCP Server, currently implemented for Cisco and Juniper, brings information about configured DHCP servers including DHCP options, pools, leased addresses, excluded addresses, and interfaces listening for DHCP requests. 

MPLS RSVP Support 

RSVP (Resource Reservation Protocol) support has been added for Juniper Junos and Cisco IOS, IOS-XE, and IOS-XR. We collect information about interfaces and neighbors. For Juniper, we also collect information about link protection. 

New vendors: Aruba Instant and Ruckus wireless.

Like other Wireless vendors already supported, we only count one license per Controller, not for each Access Point. 

Juniper MIST 

Juniper MIST - device discovery process and API endpoint usage optimized. The implementation was refactored to allow caching and to use site-specific API calls instead of per-device API calls. 

System Features – Under the hood! 

A lot has changed under the hood to ensure better stability of the tool. You may not be able to spot some of these updates, but if you want more information, don’t hesitate to reach out. 

• Automation – we added the possibility to write integration/plugins directly from the IP Fabric instance. You can expect to hear more on this subject in the coming weeks. 

• We are introducing a new API Versioning strategy. Our customers are building integrations around our API and we can no longer afford to suddenly remove any endpoints without communicating this beforehand. 

IP Fabric commits to keep support for all minor versions within the major version, for example in release 5.3.1 we will allow /api/v5.1/ calls. But API may break between major releases. 

If API request status is 410 - it means you’re using the wrong version in the URL then we’re showing an Unknown error 

• RBAC  

This is the first phase of the implementation of RBAC. It will be propagated fully over the next few releases. You will already be able to refine access policies, using the new tables under Settings > User Authentication 

• Internal updates to streamline the image creation 

And that's not all… 

IP Fabric v5.0 also brings 590+ improvements, additional features, and bug fixes. If you want to check the full list, please refer to the Release Notes. 

If you are interested or curious to find out more after reading this blog, contact us!