NetPilot

Hyperscaler Network Research Lab

Multi-vendor SONiC interop, in minutes.

AI builds a working fabric — SONiC + Cisco NX-OS + Arista EOS + Nokia SR Linux — with real CLIs in the cloud. No chassis queue, no image sourcing, no partner gate. The on-demand alternative to Aviz ONE Center for hyperscale fabric teams who need to test multi-vendor integration without waiting for a slot.

Multi-vendor SONiC + commercial NOS
100-node CLOS fabric scale
No chassis, no partner gate
See the comparison: SONiC-VS vs Aviz vs NVIDIA Air vs Keysight vs NetPilot →

Hyperscaler lab tools compared

Honest positioning. NetPilot is not a replacement for hardware-rate line-card certification (that's Keysight's lane) or OCP hardware qualification (Aviz). NetPilot is the only self-serve cloud lab for multi-vendor SONiC integration research.

DimensionMicrosoft SONiC-VS (DIY)Aviz ONE CenterNVIDIA AirKeysight SONiC TestbedNetPilot
AI-built from plain-English prompt❌❌❌❌✅
Multi-vendor (SONiC + Cisco / Arista / Nokia)❌ SONiC only⚠️ partner-gated❌ Cumulus/SONiC only✅ chassis✅
Cloud self-serve (no chassis)⚠️ self-hosted❌ hardware✅❌ hardware✅
Real NOS CLIs✅✅✅ Cumulus/SONiC✅✅
Time to first fabric labHours–daysWeeks (partner)~1 hourWeeks (chassis)~2 minutes
Failure injection (loss, link flap, malformed packets)DIY✅ hardwareLimited✅ hardware✅ Scapy + tc netem
Price tierFree (+ your infra)Partner programFree (NVIDIA ecosystem)$$$$$ (6-figure)Enterprise (contact)
Anchor scenario

Multi-vendor SONiC fabric: the real integration bugs

Hyperscaler fabrics that span vendor boundaries surface a specific class of integration bugs that never appear in single-vendor testing. Three named examples that keep recurring:

  • Route-target auto-derivation mismatch. SONiC and commercial NOSes derive RTs from VNIs differently. Manual RT configuration avoids the gotcha; auto-derivation across vendors surfaces it.
  • BUM replication behavior divergence. Ingress replication vs head-end replication vs AR-replicator topology choices. Subtle cross-vendor differences produce traffic loss under specific multicast patterns.
  • Anycast MAC handling. Distributed anycast gateways across different vendor implementations behave similarly in theory and differently in practice under specific failure modes.

NetPilot compresses the reproduction. Describe the fabric in plain English: "Leaf-spine with 2 spines (Arista EOS, Cisco NX-OS) and 4 leaves (SONiC-VS, Cisco NX-OS, Arista EOS, SONiC-VS). EVPN-VXLAN data plane. Anycast gateway on the leaves. Inject 5% packet loss between leaf-1 and spine-1." NetPilot generates per-vendor configs, deploys in ~2 minutes with real CLIs, and wires the failure injection. SSH into each device and debug the real vendor output.

Full scenario walkthrough

Alternative to Aviz ONE Center and NVIDIA Air

Where they win

  • • Aviz ONE Center: OCP-aligned hardware certification for SONiC partners
  • • NVIDIA Air: Cumulus Linux and single-vendor SONiC learning
  • • Keysight SONiC Testbed: line-rate performance at 400G/800G
  • • Microsoft SONiC-VS docs: SONiC contributor development workflows

Where NetPilot wins

  • • Self-serve, no partner program, no scheduled slot
  • • Multi-vendor: SONiC + Cisco + Arista + Nokia + FRR in one prompt
  • • Cloud-hosted — no chassis, no on-prem infrastructure
  • • AI-built fabric from plain-English description
  • • Integration-bug reproduction workflow on real CLIs

Use NetPilot when your fabric engineer needs to reproduce a SONiC-vs-Cisco integration gotcha at 11pm on a Tuesday — not when your procurement team needs an OCP-certified switch for the next RFP. The tools complement; they don't replace.

Use cases for hyperscaler fabric teams

Four hyperscaler workflows NetPilot handles without a chassis.

Multi-vendor SONiC integration

SONiC-VS + Cisco NX-OS + Arista EOS + Nokia SR Linux in one fabric. Reproduce route-target auto-derivation gotchas, BUM replication differences, anycast MAC handling divergence — the real cross-vendor integration issues that surface when fabrics span vendor boundaries.

Multi-vendor SONiC walkthrough →

100-node CLOS fabric scale testing

Build fabric-scale topologies — 2-tier or 3-tier CLOS, EVPN-VXLAN overlays, leaf-spine at 100+ nodes — with container-based vendor images on managed cloud infrastructure. BGP convergence, fabric fault-domain, and underlay protocol behavior research at scale without racking gear.

100-node fabric methodology →

AI cluster networking (RoCEv2)

Protocol-layer RoCEv2 research — PFC, DCQCN, ECN tuning, lossless Ethernet behavior, AI training fabric congestion patterns. Build the topology in plain English; iterate on control-plane parameters in minutes. Line-rate 400G/800G validation still needs hardware testers.

RoCEv2 for AI training →

FRR-based custom fabric features

FRRouting powers many hyperscaler open-NOS stacks. Build FRR labs with BGP-LU, SRv6, Babel, and EVPN in minutes — useful for SONiC extension, custom fabric protocols, and open-networking R&D where FRR is the data-plane-adjacent reference implementation.

FRR cloud lab guide →
Forward-looking

Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) research

UEC 1.0 adoption is accelerating through 2026-2027 for AI training fabrics. Protocol-layer behaviors — LLR-style link-layer retransmission semantics, CBFC flow control, packet spraying, EDS ordering — can be modeled in NetPilot labs today. Full 800GE UEC conformance still requires hardware testers, but the cloud-lab layer becomes increasingly valuable for protocol-behavior research and implementation prototyping as the spec stabilizes.

Protocols and NOSes supported

Every protocol below runs on real vendor CLIs. Community SONiC-VS is included under the enterprise plan; commercial SONiC distributions and other vendor images are supported via BYOI (bring-your-own-image).

  • SONiC (Linux Foundation community + BYOI commercial distributions)
  • Multi-vendor NOS: Cisco NX-OS / IOS, Arista EOS, Nokia SR Linux / SROS, FRR, Junos
  • EVPN-VXLAN (Type-2/3/5 routes, symmetric and asymmetric IRB, anycast gateway)
  • VXLAN (RFC 7348) with head-end and ingress replication modes
  • BGP (EVPN, PIC Edge, MP-BGP, BGP-LS, BGP-LU)
  • IS-IS (fabric underlay, wide metrics, multi-topology)
  • OSPF (multi-area, stub / NSSA, LSA types)
  • RoCEv2 with PFC and ECN — protocol-behavior layer
  • BFD (multi-hop, micro-BFD, link-local)
  • LLDP, LACP, MC-LAG (vendor-specific variants)

Name-collision note

Digital Catapult's "SONIC Labs" (UK) is an Open RAN / 5G test facility, unrelated to SONiC NOS. This page is about SONiC, the Linux Foundation open-source data-center network operating system.

Hyperscaler FAQ

Scenario-phrased questions from fabric engineers.

Describe the fabric in plain English — for example, 'leaf-spine with 2 spines (Cisco NX-OS, Arista EOS) and 4 leaves (SONiC-VS, Cisco NX-OS), EVPN-VXLAN data plane, anycast gateway.' NetPilot generates vendor-specific configs and deploys the lab in ~2 minutes with real CLIs for every NOS. SSH into each device, verify route-target handling, BUM replication behavior, and anycast MAC across vendors. The cross-vendor integration scenarios NetPilot's multi-vendor SONiC blog documents are the motivating use cases.
Yes. Aviz ONE Center is partner-gated and hardware-based — great for OCP certification and physical-hardware validation, but scheduled and appointment-based. NetPilot is self-serve and cloud-hosted — describe the SONiC + commercial-vendor topology, get a lab in ~2 minutes, no partner program required. Use Aviz for hardware certification; use NetPilot for engineer-led integration research.
Yes, for the protocol-behavior layer. NetPilot builds RoCEv2 labs with PFC, DCQCN, and ECN for congestion-behavior research, endpoint behavior, and control-plane tuning — ideal for AI cluster fabric research at the protocol layer. For line-rate validation at 400G/800G+ you still need hardware testers (Keysight IxNetwork or VIAVI TestCenter). Different tiers, complementary tools.
NetPilot is a true multi-vendor platform — NVIDIA Air is a Cumulus/SONiC-only learning tool from NVIDIA. For cross-vendor SONiC-vs-Cisco-vs-Arista integration work (the exact wedge), NetPilot is the better fit. Cumulus Linux is supported under BYOI with your NVIDIA licensing. Use NVIDIA Air for Cumulus/SONiC learning; use NetPilot for multi-vendor fabric integration research.
Yes. NetPilot's scale-testing workflow handles 100-node CLOS fabrics using container-based vendor NOS images on managed cloud infrastructure. BGP convergence at fabric scale, EVPN-VXLAN scaling behavior, and fabric fault-domain research all run without physical gear. See the 100-node-fabric scale testing blog for the methodology.
No — they're unrelated. Digital Catapult's SONIC Labs is an Open RAN / 5G test facility in the UK. SONiC is a Linux Foundation open-source network operating system for data-center switches. NetPilot supports SONiC NOS multi-vendor integration; it does not target Open RAN testing.
Some UEC-adjacent protocol behaviors — LLR-style link-layer retransmission semantics, CBFC, and packet-spraying patterns — can be modeled at the protocol layer in NetPilot labs. Full UEC 1.0 conformance at 800GE line rate requires hardware testers. As UEC adoption accelerates through 2027, the cloud-lab layer becomes increasingly valuable for protocol-behavior research and implementation prototyping.
NetPilot supports SONiC under the enterprise plan — the Linux Foundation community SONiC-VS as the baseline, plus support for commercial SONiC distributions via BYOI (bring-your-own-image). For multi-vendor SONiC-vs-Cisco-vs-Arista integration labs, the community SONiC-VS image is sufficient in most cases.
Microsoft's official SONiC-VS documentation targets SONiC community contributors running single-NOS development environments. NetPilot is a multi-vendor research lab — describe a fabric with SONiC + Cisco NX-OS + Arista EOS + Nokia SR Linux, and NetPilot deploys it. Different scope: SONiC-VS is for building SONiC; NetPilot is for testing SONiC against other vendors.

Related reading

Deeper dives on the scenarios and workflows above.

Tutorial

Multi-Vendor SONiC Integration Lab

SONiC + Cisco NX-OS + Arista EOS in the same fabric — the hyperscaler integration pattern.

Guide

Scale Testing 100-Node Fabrics

Cloud-based methodology for fabric-scale BGP convergence and EVPN-VXLAN research without hardware.

Tutorial

FRRouting Cloud Labs

Six FRR protocols in one prompt — BGP, OSPF, IS-IS, Babel, EVPN, SRv6 — for open-networking R&D.

Guide

AI Cluster Networking with RoCEv2

AI training fabric research — PFC, DCQCN, ECN — at the protocol-behavior layer.

Comparison

Keysight vs VIAVI vs NetPilot: Research Lab Comparison

Honest comparison across platforms — hardware testers, DIY, cloud.

Hub

Network Research Lab

The parent hub — all six research segments.

Ready to run multi-vendor fabric labs in minutes?

Dedicated environment, custom vendor image support, SSO, audit, workflow integration — talk to us about a hyperscaler research plan. Or spin up a free lab and try the SONiC multi-vendor integration yourself.