Discover our use cases

No there is no graphical user interface or website for VyOS. Configuration is made via the CLI.

Take a look at the subscription section, where we explain about the support professional support options.

Take a prepared hypervisor image or boot the iso file on your system. Login and execute 'install image'.
More details here:
https://vyos.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install.html

The documentation is in a process of reorganization. You can read more about this here: https://blog.vyos.io/google-season-of-docs

There are two new types of documentation in process:

The Manual located on github automatically deployed n Readthedocs: https://vyos.readthedocs.io
Where you can find the basic description of the VyOS and its configuration

The articels here on https://support.vyos.io where you can find more specific information, troubleshooting or workarounds

If you want the latest features (even if they are not working perfectly yet) or you send us pull requests, than you can be sure the contribution will be available to you and willing testers in a reasonable time. Since in VyOS it's easy to revert to the previous version if something goes wrong, the rolling release should be good enough for non-critical production use, since you can always go back to a working version at the end of the maintenance window and report the findings.

The build process is described in the README.md in this git repository:
https://github.com/vyos/vyos-build

Can I contribute to VyOS?

Everyone is welcome to contribute to VyOS. Even if you are not a programmer, there are lots of things to do, including writing documentation, testing development builds, and reporting issues.

What are the benefits for contributors?

The goal of introducing LTS release image access subscriptions was to make VyOS development sustainable.

This is why we made them available for people who help the project move forward, either by purchasing a subscription and thus funding the work of the maintainers, or by participating in the project directly.

If you are contributing code, substantial amount of testing or documentation writing, or you are active VyOS evangelist, you are eligible for a free LTS image access subscription. 

How do I contribute to documentation?

VyOS documentation is now being developed in this repository: https://github.com/vyos/vyos-documentation/

It's a Sphinx project that is automatically deployed to https://vyos.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

The VyOS wiki (http://wiki.vyos.net) is going to be phased out when its content is migrated to the vyos-documentation project and this knowledge base.

How do I become a tester?

Rolling release images are built nightly by our CI server, and can be found at https://downloads.vyos.io/?dir=rolling/current/amd64

Issues should be reported to https://phabricator.vyos.net/

How do I become a developer?

VyOS source code is at https://github.com/vyos/

The vyos-build repository (https://github.com/vyos/vyos-build/) contains the image build scripts.

All new features are now added to the vyos-1x package (https://github.com/vyos/vyos-1x) in an effort to consolidate the code and data.

Old packages inherited from Vyatta Core such as vyatta-cfg-system are considered legacy and are eliminated when the code they contain is redesigned and rewritten.

Since the release of VyOS 1.2.0 we no longer accept new features in Perl and shell and no longer use the original command template system, and such code will be rejected. All new code must follow the new guidelines created to ensure maintainability and enable us to introduce features formerly prevented by the limitations of the old config backend and old coding approach, such as parallelized commits, live rollbacks and so on.

Before you make a pull request, please create a task in Phabricator and reference it in your commit messages, e.g. "[BGP] T42: add support for overly large communities".

What hardware platforms VyOS supports?

At the moment, VyOS works on x86-64, either bare metal of virtualized.

Support for 32-bit x86 has been discontinued as of 1.2.0 release.

What virtualization platforms are supported?

VyOS supports KVM, Xen (in HVM mode), VMware, and Microsoft Hyper-V and includes drivers and guest agent daemons for those platforms.

VirtualBox is supported but we don’t include guest additions for it.

Other x86 hypervisors may work as well.

Will there be an ARM version?

We have made experimental images for some ARM boards, but there’s nothing production ready.
Due to lack of standardized boot firmware standard and even standardized endianness of ARM CPUs, it’s impossible to provide a generic ARM image that would be readily usable for everyone.

The most realistic plan right now is to support ARM64 hypervisors. We don’t rule out making images for specific network-oriented ARM boards in the future, but we are not planning to support single NIC boards such as RaspberryPi.

What are the hardware requirements?

The smallest amount of RAM that VyOS can boot with is 256MB. Trying to boot VyOS on machines with less RAM will cause boot errors.

Otherwise, hardware requirements vary greatly between use cases. For small office use, low end CPUs and 512MB RAM should be more than enough.

For high performance routers, high end CPUs and larget amounts of RAM are required.

What is the release model?

VyOS is split in two branches: long term support and rolling release.

The rolling release branch (git branch “current”) includes the latest code from maintainers and all contributions from community members are merged into it. It’s meant for testing and lab/noncritical router use and is not guaranteed to be stable.

Long term support branches are split from the current branch periodically. They are stable, and only proven, strictly compatible changes are merged or backported into it.

ISO images of the rolling release are public, while long term support release ISOs are only available to subscribers and contributors in binary form.

Is VyOS free and open source software?

Yes. The entire code base is available to the public on Github, complete with the build toolchain.

We also keep Debian package repositories used for image builds public so building it completely from source is not required.

Is VyOS free to use?

Rolling release images are free to download for everyone. Long term support images follow a RedHat-like “pay for binaries” model, though they are available for active contributors to the project for free as well.

Ready to use long term support release images are only available to customers who purchased a subscription and to community members who are contributing code, testing, or documentation to the project.

Everyone can build an LTS release image from the stable branch too. For 1.2.x, the branch is named “crux”. The image built from the branch is equivalent to the latest official LTS image.

How can I buy a subscription?

Visit https://vyos.io/subscriptions/

How do I get a free subscription as a contributor?

If you are contributing code, actively testing the development images and reporting bugs, writing documentation, or helping spread the word by writing blog posts, speaking at conferences etc., you can get access to LTS images for free.

Just fill this form: https://share.hsforms.com/1DmAR8XwnR2W2Ys8-gBbiOQ2ghzu and we will contact you.

Please describe your contributions and provide links to git commits, Phabricator tasks, wiki pages, blog posts and anything else.

People who have contributed to VyOS before release model change in 2019 can get a perpetual subscription. Everyone who contributed only after the model change gets a yearly subscription that is extended if they remain active within the project.

Do I need a subscription if I deployed an instance from a cloud marketplace?

No, everyone who deploys an instance from Amazon, Azure etc. marketplace is eligible for free updates. Contact us and provide your subscriber identifier.

Rolling release is by definition is not guaranteed to be stable. If any error happend, please check

https://forum.vyos.io or the bugtracker if the error is already known. If not feel free to report your issue.

No there is no limitation in the Software.

It run / route as fast as the underlying hardware (cpu & nic) allows it to run.

under the command 'show log' you see all possible log sources.

See here for more Troubleshooting guides:

https://vyos.readthedocs.io/en/latest/troubleshooting.html

No, VyOS uses "binary installation" that allows you to keep multiple images on the same system and switch between them. This requires a full installation of the system.

To ensure upgrade safety, VyOS uses "binary installation" that allows you to keep multiple images on the same system and switch between them.

Upgrade procedure

Note: if you have a working system, you don't need to boot from the ISO in order to upgrade! The commands given below are to be issued from your current system. The only reason to boot from the ISO is installing VyOS on a new machine.

1. Lookup the URL for the requires release in release notes or release announcement. Note: the URL/image file is dependant on your system architecture if you pick the wrong architecture you can end up with a non-responsive remote device.
2. Issue the following operational mode command: add system image <image URL>
3. Answer the installation script questions.
4. [Optional] View images with "show system image" operational command.
5. Reboot your system.

If upgrade went wrong

If you can access the machine console, reboot it and select the previous image in the GRUB menu. Upgrade does not modify existing images and files associated with them, so you will be able to get a working system again.

Config migration

Forward-compatible configuration syntax changed are handled automatically. In case a release includes incompatible syntax changes, you may need to edit your config or perform other actions, check release notes. Releases are assumed to be backward-compatible unless otherwise specified.

Upgrading from 1.1.x

If you are running a release prior to 1.1.0, it is recommended to first upgrade to 1.1.8 before upgrading to the current release. Upgrading directly from older releases may result in a non-bootable image.

A note on apt-get

Even though VyOS is Debian-based, it does not use apt-get for the upgrade. The only supported upgrade procedure is image-based upgrade described above.

Using apt-get upgrade/dist-upgrade is very likely to render your system inoperable.

Right after install, you should be able to login with these credentials:
username: vyos
password:  vyos