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Step 1: Begin

This guide walks you through installing Paragon Automation, onboarding your devices, and configuring Paragon Automation to manage your devices. Use this guide if you are a network operator or administrator.

Meet Paragon Automation

Juniper® Paragon Automation is a cloud-ready solution for network planning, configuration, provisioning, traffic engineering, monitoring, and life-cycle management that brings advanced visualization capabilities and analytics to network management and monitoring. For a complete list of supported devices, see Supported Devices and OS Versions.

Paragon Automation offers a suite of microservices-based applications—Juniper® Paragon Insights (formerly HealthBot), Juniper® Paragon Planner (formerly NorthStar Planner), and Juniper® Paragon Pathfinder (formerly NorthStar Controller). When you add any of these applications to Paragon Automation, the API suite of the application integrates with Paragon Automation to allow seamless communication between new and existing services. The microservices interact with one another through APIs and SSH and run within containers in a Kubernetes cluster.

You install Paragon Automation on a Kubernetes cluster. The nodes within a cluster perform different roles or functions depending on which Kubernetes components are installed. For more information about roles, see Cluster Node Roles.

System Requirements

The hardware and software requirements for installing Paragon Automation depend on the size of the network and the number of devices that you want to manage. For a complete list of supported devices, see Supported Devices and OS Versions. Before you install paragon Automation, ensure that the requirements listed in the following sections are met.

Cluster Node Requirements

Paragon Automation is deployed as a multinode cluster comprising multiple nodes, either VMs or BMSs, where at least one node acts as primary and at least three nodes act as workers and provide storage.

  • Control plane high availability—For control plane redundancy, you must have a minimum of three primary nodes. We also recommend a maximum of three primary nodes. The total number of primary nodes must be an odd number.

  • Workload high availability—For workload high availability and workload performance, you must have more than one worker.

  • Storage high availability—For storage high availability, you must have at least three nodes for Ceph storage.

For details, see Paragon Automation Implementation.

Hardware Requirements

The hardware and disk size requirements of the cluster nodes vary widely based on the intended capacity of the network. For details on minimum hardware requirements of the cluster nodes and the Ansible control host, see Hardware Requirements.

Software Requirements

You must install a base OS of Ubuntu or RHEL on all the nodes and you must install Docker on the Ansible control host node. For details on the software requirements on the nodes, see Software Requirements.

Disk Requirements

The cluster node disks must be SSD and have a root as well as Ceph partition at the least. For details on the disk and partition requirements, see Disk Requirements.

Network Requirements

All nodes must have an SSH server and NTP running on them. The cluster nodes also require that specific ports are kept open for inter-cluster communication. For details on the networking prerequisites and a list of ports that must be open, see Network Requirements.

Web Browser Requirements

For a list of Web browsers that Paragon Automation supports, see Web Browser Requirements.

Install Paragon Automation

Figure 1 provides a high-level order of the installation tasks.
Figure 1: High-Level Process Flow for Installing Paragon Automation High-Level Process Flow for Installing Paragon Automation

To install Paragon Automation, you must perform the following steps:

  1. Prepare the Ansible control host and the cluster nodes for installation and identify the Virtual IP addresses (VIPs).

    For information on nodes with Ubuntu as the base OS, see Installation Prerequisites on Ubuntu.

    For information on nodes with RHEL as the base OS, see Installation Prerequisites on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

  2. Download the installation bundle to the control host and extract the installation files.

    For information, see Download the Software.

  3. Install the files and deploy Paragon Automation on the Kubernetes cluster. The installation procedure, at a high level, comprises the following steps:

    1. Initialize a configuration directory with the configuration template files using the init command.

    2. Customize the inventory file, with the IP addresses of the cluster nodes, as well as the usernames and the authentication information required to connect to the nodes, using the inv command. The inventory file is in the YAML format and describes the cluster nodes on which Paragon Automation will be installed.

    3. Configure the installer and choose the components to be installed and configure your Paragon Automation setup, using the conf command.

    4. Install the Paragon Automation cluster based on the information that you configured, using the deploy command.

    For detailed installation steps on nodes with Ubuntu as the base OS, see Install Multinode Cluster on Ubuntu.

    For detailed installation steps on nodes with RHEL as the base OS, see Install Multinode Cluster on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Log in to the Paragon Automation UI

After you install Paragon Automation, log in to the Paragon Automation UI. For information on how to log in to the UI, see Log in to the Paragon Automation UI.

Set Up Licenses

You can use the Paragon applications if you have the software licenses installed. To use Paragon Insights, Paragon Pathfinder, and Paragon Planner, you must install the respective licenses on the License Management page (Administration > License Management).

For more information, see About the License Management Page and View, Add, or Delete Licenses.