Building Data Center Networks with Arista

Now that you’ve learned the basic and advanced concepts of Ansible, it’s time to start automating networks! In this book, we want to offer you realistic network scenarios with common network vendors but without overcomplicating the network architecture so that you can focus on the automation part. The first scenario in Part 2 is a data center fabric using Arista EOS. This chapter outlines how to manage Arista EOS devices using Ansible modules and illustrates how Ansible connects to Arista devices and helps you configure and collect operational data.

In this chapter, we will start building the Arista configurations for our topology that was described in Chapter 2, but you could apply the learning to any type of network scenario or network vendor (leveraging the right Ansible collections). Remember that the lab is available by following the instructions in Chapter 16. The lab topology you will be creating over the next three...