vSRX is the Virtual edition of Juniper’s SRX Series physical firewalls, offering same features but in a much lighter package suitable for virtual and cloud environments. vSRX 3.0 is the new architecture of vSRX that was introduced back in 18.4R1. Many features have been introduced with that architecture change, including a greatly improved boot time compared to the old one. I’m experimenting with it to demonstrate some features of Contrail, so here’s how to deploy it on Openstack environments.
Get vSRX 3.0 Image
You can download vSRX 3.0 images directly from Juniper support website here. Make sure to download the qcow2 image file. For this post, I’ll be using 19.1R1-S1.3, but procedures will likely be similar on all vSRX 3.0 releases. You can also obtain an evaluation license from here.
Create the Config File
While creating the instance, you should provide it with the configuration file that must be applied to vSRX. You can boot the instance without config though, but you would have to do everything manually after boot-up, not fun.
Configuration file must start with #junos-config which will be interpreted by cloud-init to do the deployment. The following is a sample configuration file. Password for contrail user is c0ntrail123: