Heart of Aruba’s Campus Core and Aggregation Products isAruba OS CX. There are many new features coming with this important software release with key improvements across all facets of the product. Some of the most notable are the availability of VLAN ACLs, PBR and MP-BGP with IPv6 support.

Key Features

VLAN ACLs/Policies/Classifiers

- ACLs, Policies and Classifiers can now be applied to a VLAN interface. This simplifies the application of these elements on VLANs facing the clients or other networks.

Control Plane ACLs

- Control Plane ACLs control access to the control plane, this is primarily used to control access to services like SSH, SNMP, NTP or the web server. However, this can also be extended to control plane network services like BGP, etc.

- Control Plane ACLs supports IPv4 and IPv6 type access-lists and can be applied per VRF.

Object Groups for ACLs

- This feature enables the creation of named groups representing sets of IPv4 or IPv6 addresses and L4 port ranges.

Policy Based Routing (PBR)

Routing Enhancements

- MP-BGP with IPv6 Address Family (Also known as BGP4+) - Multi Protocol BGP Support with the IPv6 Address family.

- Multicast Routing - Loopback for RP and BSR supported for both IPv4 and IPv6.

- IPv6 Multicast Routing- Support MLD, MLD Snooping, and PIM-SM v6 Routing; provide capability to enable routing of IPv6 Multicast Traffic.

- BGP connections over GRE Tunnels-Enable BGP peering and routing through a GRE tunnel.

NAE Enhancements

NAE Encrypted Credentials: 

- Due to the popularity of using NAE to connect to external services and REST APIs, we needed to enable this to be done securely. External services commonly connected to are things like email servers or API based services like ServiceNow.

Periodic Callback Actions:

- This feature introduces a new condition syntax to periodically execute a callback function for a given period of time. Using NAE python API, user can set callbacks to be called in regular intervals.

NAE Time Series for External APIs (Using Periodic Callback Actions):

- Using a new feature in 10.2 for NAE, a NAE Agent can be created using an external API from another device or service. Monitoring an API in a connected access switch or even the Mobility Master will be possible with the 10.2 release of ArubaOS-CX.

VXLAN Key Update

- VXLAN will be supported on the 8325 switch series

- The initial release of the 8325 switches will support Static L2 and L3 VXLAN

VSX Enhancements

- VSX and Spanning Tree Interoperability.

- VSX Active/Active Multicast Routing.

- VSX Additional Sync Features

- More VSX sync features, list below.

- CoPP, PBR, QoS, VLAN ACL, VLAN Classifier/Policy, AAA/Users, DNS, NTP, sFlow, SNMP, SSH, Static route.

- VSX Graceful Upgrade for Routing Features - Enable automated traffic draining for VSX member about to be upgraded. OSPF, PIM, BGP