Announcing FTAS v3.6: Elevating Automation Coverage, Scale, and Platform Reliability

Announcing FTAS version 3.6! In FTAS 3.6 our efforts have been entirely focused around advancing automation for our most critical functionalities and creating validation use cases driven by our customer base. With a strengthened test matrix covering our switching, routing, virtualization, telemetry and agent infrastructure, FTAS v3.6 dramatically increases production readiness and reliability of the platform regardless of enterprise environment. With an FTAS test suite now numbering 448 individual tests, you have an infinitely stronger net of coverage!

Key Enhancements in FTAS v3.6

1. Robust Layer 2 & Layer 3 Automation

• Port Channel Subinterface Enhancements:We've extended automation coverage for Port Channel subinterface capabilities. That means covering BGP validation, IPv6 validation, multi-VRF validation, as well as essential negative deployment use cases. It provides resilience when failures occur and all automation goes as expected but does something.
• PVST (Per-VLAN Spanning Tree) Validation:Enhanced resiliency in the L2 infrastructure to make it bulletproof is the core enhancement added in v3.6, consisting of a complete automation of PVST. As part of the PVST automation, you have coverage and validation of VLAN to STP behavior, load balancing, and L2 recovery events for several failure events (SPOFD, port flap).

2. Advanced Virtualization & Telemetry

• OpenStack EVPN-VXLAN Mobility: Increased virtualization footprint automation by adding a VM mobility & migration automation to EVPN-VXLAN fabrics for OpenStack.
• sFlow Monitoring Enhancements:We've augmented network telemetry tests with new sFlow validation suites centered on flexibility for configuring our collector, VRF management support, and stability in the longest test case.

3. High-Scale Testing & Infrastructure Hardening

• VTEP Scale & Resiliency:How about scalability of the network? Scaling should never mean destabilizing the network. With large scale EVPN-VXLAN implementations, we have increased our VTEP scale testing. For large scale testing of EVPN-VXLAN environments, our tests focused on large scale up to 250 VTEP environments as our convergence and failure tests would put extreme loads on all the test components of the infrastructure.
• ONES Agent Validation and Hardening:We've automated nearly all parts of the ONES Agent lifecycle from installation and graceful recovery, through monitoring process health and validating efficient resource allocation.

4. Expanded Platform & CLI Support

• Broadcom CLI Hardening:ONC agents, nearly in all stages of their lifecycle (installation and automatic graceful recovery) from monitoring health and resource use are now automatic.
• Introduction of FMCLI Support:All our ONC agents across almost every phase of their lifecycle have now been automated (from monitoring health and resource usage, through automatic graceful recovery and installation).

FTAS v3.6 By the Numbers

With an ever expanding testing matrix, your fabric should run beautifully. The FTAS test suite now boasts a full complement of 448 individual test cases covering L2/L3, virtualization, telemetry, scaling, agent framework, and CLI automation.

Next Steps

• Review the detailed release notes
• Schedule a technical walkthrough
• Engage with us to validate your production fabric at scale