How to Leverage Junos Space with Network Director

Configuring DHCP options and sub-options can also be laborious and time-consuming, especially for a DHCP server. Junos Space and Network Director can help you to provision your DHCP servers quicker while saving you time, especially if you are using Software Defined Networking technologies in your environment.

Think of Junos Space with Network Director as the centralized location where all of the configuration options come from. The Network Director feature is a tool that lets you manage your switches and firewalls through Zero Touch Provisioning, which automates deployments and configuration tasks. 

DHCP options are notoriously complicated to set up, and Juniper lets you deploy these options directly from your DHCP server which is incredibly efficient and easy. It takes out several manual steps to help you cut down on time spent, human error, and setup complexity.

One example of the complexity that is required to set up these DHCP options is that some values need to be converted to hex in order for an installation to proceed. A common setting that needs such a conversion is option 43 on a DHCP server. Software-defined networks are incredibly complex, which is why so many engineers need to have access to third-party tools to convert IP addresses to hex.

Need to Learn Juniper First?

You must walk before you run right? To be able to leverage the Junos Space and Network Director, you need to have the fundamentals down. CBT Nuggets offers Juniper training to help admins and engineers get up to speed. Juniper is considered the top competitor to Cisco, so knowing how to use Juniper Networking technologies enables you to diversify your skill set. 

Start a 7-day free trial today to start building your Juniper knowledge!

What is Junos Space?

Juniper Space allows engineers to configure switching, routing, and networking devices so that they can be managed efficiently and automatically from a single application. 

It allows for a unified configuration platform that is easily accessible to a team of network engineers and allows for faster installation and configuration times while improving the accuracy of device configurations by eliminating human error.

What is Junos Network Director?

Junos Network Director allows your network engineers to manage and configure network infrastructure from a single toolkit by using Junos. Through it, your teams can quickly see what is happening on your networks through a single pane of glass.

Your network engineers can consolidate multiple legacy tools and applications with Junos Space Network Director, an on-premises management solution that automates repetitive, difficult tasks.

Automating repetitive tasks like network device provisioning and fault finding improves how well the network operates, and how reliable it is while providing unprecedented visibility and information about the network in real time.

How Does Junos Space with Network Director Help Engineers?

The main feature that engineers benefit from with Junos Space Network Director is the automation of monotonous tasks. It saves time and effort by taking the repetitive tasks of configuration and setup and does it all for you. It removes human error and creates an automated environment that is faster and more accurate to deploy Junos hardware and software configurations within.

In the example of DHCP options, even though you only have to enter the hex IP address for Option 43 once, there is still a lot to do after that. Junos Space can interact with the TFTP server, generate the configs and get your images loaded and ready to go. This is all done in the DHCP scope that you have defined, which saves an incredible amount of time. 

Then the Junos Space with Network Director updates the devices and upgrades the operating system, firmware, base configuration, and other software to the specified versions. 

Once the DHCP and TFTP servers have been configured, the Junos Space Network Director imports them into their inventory as manageable objects automatically. This gives you a much easier method of managing them going forward from a single application.

How to Leverage Junos Space With Network Director

This solution has plenty of benefits for complex networks that need to expand rapidly without downtime and delays. It has built-in support and management for multiple fabric layers, and makes it much easier to assess the health of the network both before and after any deployments have gone live. 

Other options that you can leverage include Traffic Behavior Insights, Plug and Play Operations, Automatic Fabric Creation, and End-to-End Performance Boosts, which can greatly improve how visible your network’s performance and configuration is to your network teams.

Final Thoughts

We have covered quite a lot in this article, but the main takeaway is that Junos Space with Network Director is a game changer for network engineers. It takes previously daunting technical tasks and performs them at scale with Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) styled automation. 

Juniper saw the need for automating these tasks almost 20 years ago, and they have been building solutions that have created the highly efficient and manageable environments that we see today. 

Scaling up, or down has never been easier, and Juniper equipment makes it all possible with their SDN architecture and management products like Junos Space with Network Director.