Arista Cloud Test

Arista Cloud Test is a multi-tenant, cloud-hosted virtual lab environment that allows network engineers and automation developers to deploy full Arista network topologies using virtual instances of EOS, CloudEOS, and CloudVision Portal, without physical hardware. The environment runs each device as a separate virtual machine within a VxLAN Layer 2 overlay built on the cloud provider's underlying Layer 3 infrastructure, which means that the connectivity behaviour within the virtual topology mirrors what the same EOS configuration would produce on physical hardware, including L2 adjacencies, VLAN segmentation, and spanning-tree behaviour. Topologies are defined in YAML files, and the platform validates the topology before provisioning, preventing malformed configurations from consuming lab resources.

Access to deployed topologies is available through HTTPS directly in a browser or via an IPSec VPN tunnel for workflows that require direct IP connectivity to the in-topology management plane, for example Ansible playbooks that SSH into each virtual switch, or AVD pipelines that deploy full fabric configurations across dozens of virtual nodes simultaneously. A pre-built Tools Server node packages the tooling most commonly required for Arista automation development: GitLab for source control and CI/CD pipelines, Ansible and AVD for automated configuration deployment, and Wireshark for packet-level verification of dataplane behaviour within the topology. Third-party vendor devices can be included via Bring Your Own License arrangements, enabling interoperability testing between Arista EOS nodes and devices from other vendors within the same virtual fabric.