Automating the creating of interfaces in a virtual chassis

[richardjohnallsopp]

I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas or suggestions for automating the creation of interfaces for virtual chassis nodes in Netbox? I would love to be able to use jinja 2 or the nice UI Gi1/0/[1-48] feature, but as these aren't exposed via the API or ansible modules (to my knowledge) I've been using the following.

    # create interfaces on each virtual chassis node
    - name: Create interface on each node
      netbox.netbox.netbox_device_interface:
        netbox_url: "https://{{ deployment_type }}"
        netbox_token: "{{ netbox_key }}"
        data:
          device: "{{ item[0].switch }}"
          name: "Gi{{ item[0].switch.split('_')[1] }}/0/{{ item[1].interface }}"
          type: "1000Base-t"
        state: present
      with_nested:
        - "{{ switches }}"
        - "{{ interfaces }}"
      when: item[0].device_type == "C9300-48P-A" or item[0].device_type == "WS-C3850-48P"
      tags:
        - add_interfaces

This works fine, but it's really slow when you're doing a full stack of 8 or 9 switches.

[sdktr]

Are the interfaces not included in your device type templates? If you setup each device type once, you'll have them copied over on creation of a new instance.
After that, if you need to update the interface names (Gi1/x -> Gi2/d)you can do that in bulk using a http patch. I don't think bulk actions are available in the netbox ansible modules, but a simple-ish 'uri' task will do as well.

For the specific purpose of creating a virtual chassis I know my colleagues have duplicated the device types to facilitate the creation of 'members' with the correct interface numbering. Eg: 9200-master and 9200-member1 are available. If you update the member device type later on, your initial copied components remain and are not updated.

[richardjohnallsopp]

Thanks for the reply, I removed the templates as it was just an extra step to clean up when automating it. We're wanting to do this with full automation so I was hoping that there would be some form of Python or Ansible bulk update option. The one I posted above does work, it's just a little bit slower that I would have liked. Having said that it's better than the manual approach so I'll just deal with it.