Using a NETCONF NED

NETCONF can be used as a NED instead of a CLI-based NED. The built-in NED for IOS-XR does not appear to support NETCONF, however you can easily create your own NETCONF NED by pulling the YANG modules from the device itself.

Note that you may need an XRv9K for this to work properly. I have only tested this on XRv9K.

First we connect to the XRv9K using device-type cli.

devices device xr1
 device-type cli ned-id cisco-ios-xr...
 connect

On the XRv, we must enable NETCONF:

ssh server v2
ssh server netconf
netconf-yang agent ssh
netconf agent tty

In NSO, fetch SSH host keys and do a sync from:

devices device xr1 ssh fetch-host-keys
devices device xr1 sync-from

Enable devtools and change the device-type to netconf

devtools true
conf t
netconf-ned-builder project xr 7.11
 device               xrv9k-controller
 local-user           admin
 vendor               Cisco
 max-download-threads 1
devices device xr1
 device-type netconf ned-id netconf
 no device-type cli protocol ssh
 connect

We then fetch the YANG module list from the XRv:

netconf-ned-builder project xr 7.11 fetch-module-list 
netconf-ned-builder project xr 7.11 module Cisco-IOS-XR-* * select

Build the NED and export it:

netconf-ned-builder project xr 7.11 build-ned
netconf-ned-builder project xr 7.11 export-ned to-directory /tmp

Transfer it to the packages dir

mv -f /tmp/<filename>.tar.gz ~/nso-instance1/packages/

In NSO reload packages and use the new NED

packages reload
devices device xr1
 device-type netconf ned-id xr-nc-7.11

Reference

https://www.zhaocs.info/new-install-nso-and-connect-with-xr-by-cli-netconf-ned.html

https://developer.cisco.com/docs/nso/guides/ned-development/#netconf-ned-development