mattpascoe
commented
7 years ago I thank you for your comments and question.
ONAs origins are from a small to large enterprise perspective. A single large network with NAT and centralized control over the entire network environment. As needs grew and networks got more complex the realization around handling things such as corporate mergers etc where overlapping space did come up. This is where the "contexts" concept came into play.
This was mostly a bandaid solution as it was easy to implement without too much effort. It is however the nuclear option and does not provide a clean unified view of all of the information.
The reality as it stands right now is that while development is still happening with ONA, it is limited mostly to myself and the immediate needs I have at my $DAYJOB. My area of work is more corporate level and not geared from the Service Provider perspective so thus I likely don't cover all of the situations you might encounter.
With that said, I do have plans and a desire to allow ONA the ability to manage MPLS/VRF environments. This effectively adds an additional layer on top of a subnet that groups it within a VRF. That would then allow me to open up the restriction to use overlapping IP addresses. My goal is to follow those network restrictions and standards. I think this would however provide you the ability to do what you need even if you were not using VRFs in reality.
At this point I can't commit to any timeframe on that feature. It's not on the list for $DAYJOB so I'd have to do it on my own time. I would consider doing it as a paid feature if anyone is willing though ;)
Certainly more design and planning needs to be applied to the concept as well to ensure a clean implementation with everything else.
We are an Operations Service Provider, and as such we have a lot of customers with the same IP subnets. We use IPSEC VPN tunnels to most of our customers, and when we have customers with conflicting subnet, we either change their subnet (if it's a small customer), or we NAT their adresses som that we can manage them from our Operations Center. However, when it comes to managing the IP-addresses, we have some challenges. We are at the moment evaluating both ONA and IPPlan as our new IPAM systems. I have to say, ONA works just perfectly for everything else we need it for, and is so much more intuitive (and a lot of other things) than IPPlan, but since we have some customers with the same subnets, we would have to maintain a separate "Excel-hell" for those subnets. I know this is a feature that has been in demand for years, and that a "solution" is provided by the concept of "Contexts", but I have yet to see a solution that keeps ONA as easy to use and maintain as it is with other concerns. We are participating in several Service Provider forums, and it is a general concensus that IPPlan is pretty much the only tool that fulfills all the needs of such environments, albeit its other lacks. ONA is just missing sooooo little, to be the perfect tool for Service Providers. Is it really that hard to beat this challenge?
Regards Morten Starvik Head of Consulting Waveit AS