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Arista DCS-7050S-52-R Modding

Arista DCS-7050S-52-R Modding

Background

I've recently purchased two Arista switches a 7124S and 7050s. Best piece of advice, stay away from the 7100 gen1 and gen 2 switches. These are too old and don't support enough modding features. The other issue, especiially with the Gen 1 7100, the DIMM is a special DDR2 format called Mini DIMM. Finding the right DIMM is very difficult and I have spent too much money on DIMMs going that route.

Modding Solutions

The 7050s is by far the cheapest and most mod friendly platform. I was able to upgrade it to 16GB of RAM, 4GB DOM SSD, and I've thrown several different optics towards the SFP+ ports. The swich supports EOS 4.18 and below. If you want support for 4.21 or 4.22 EOS, then you should fork the money over for a 7050QX. The issue with that platform, 40G interfaces. I don't have a need for 40G and I save approximately $400 in my hobby expenses.

Purpose

By not sounding too crazy, this is my hobby. I wanted to have 10G interfaces for my VMWare Lab servers and other switches. Having OpenFlow and potentially docker available on the switch, allows me to expand my dabbling in Network Automation.

Upgrades, Configs, and Mods

Fans and Noise

  • environment fan-speed override 30

Allow SCP copy to the device

  • aaa authorization exec default local

USB DOM

  • Innodisk USB 4GB SSD Hard Drive NAND FLASH MEMORY DOM USB Header

DIMMs

  • Upgraded from 4GB of ECC RAM to 16GB of ECC RAM
    • TriCor TRF7256U64F9333G7-HYBP
  • New RAM
    • 2x8GB PC3-12800R DDR3-1600MHz 1Rx4 Reg ECC Samsung M393B1G70BH0-CK0

Compatible 3rd Party Optics

  • To support 3rd party optics and DACs, create an empty file "enable3px" in /mnt/flash/
    • FINISAR CORP.    FTLX1471D3BCL
    • CISCO-TYCO       1-2053783-2
    • CISCO-TYCO       1-2053783-2
    • US Critical             GLC-T-US
    • Methode Elec.        SP7041-M1-JN1-01
    • OEM OPTIC          E10GSFPLR-OO
    • Intel Corp               FTLX1471D3BCV-I3

Future

SSD

  • There is a SATA connector that appears to allow for a SATA SSD drive to be plugged into it.
  • This would require an right angle connector and some way to secure the SSD drive.
  • Ideas
    • Use a right angle SATA adapter.
    • Use an M2 SATA drive.
    • Secure to the middle frame using some sort of ribbon cable.

ext4 boot

  • I would like to boot using an ext4 formatted partition.
  • Today it appears to only allow vfat with a 2GB partition size limit.
  • Aboot does a dosfscheck at boot everytime.

Aboot

  • Upgrade Aboot and coreboot to allow for more flexibility and maybe features.
  • Need to learn how Aboot is flashed and how to recover from a "mistake."
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