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Lihua Yuan edited this page Mar 5, 2017 · 23 revisions

##SCOPE

Q. What is SONiC?

A. SONiC is a collection of networking software components required to have a fully functional L3 device. It is designed meet the requirements of cloud data center. It is fully open-sourced at OCP.

Q. Is SONiC a Linux distribution?

A. No. SONiC is Linux-based, but is not a distribution by itself. Today, SONiC runs on Debian Jessie. SONiC has also been ported to Ubuntu (as a snap).

Q. How is SONiC distributed?

A. SONiC is fully open-sourced on github, and distributed under Apache License.

Q. How is SONiC supported?

A. Microsoft has no plans to sell SONiC to customers or provide any network engineering or development support.

Q. What is the relationship between Azure Cloud Switch and SONiC?

A. Mostly. ACS builds on top of SONiC with internal cloud management applications.

##Hardware

Q. Does SONiC have any hardware?

A. No SONiC is purely a software offering.

Q. Where is Microsoft planning on deploying SONiC?

A. SONiC is deployed in Microsoft cloud data center infrastructure.

Q. Which hardware platforms and ASIC chipset are you running SONiC on?

A. You can find a full list of supported platforms at: https://github.com/Azure/SONiC/wiki/Supported-Devices-and-Platforms

Q. Is SONiC deployed in Microsoft datacenters today?

A. Yes, SONiC is deployed in Microsoft production datacenters.

Q. How many devices are SONiC based?

A. The deployment is growing from one datacetner to cross regions. We plan to rapidly expand SONiC deployment over the coming months.

Q. Does the SONiC offer Linux options, and/or can it be customized?

A. Today (March, 2017) SONiC requires Linux kernel 3.16. We built and tested on Debian Linux, but theoretically any distribution could be supported. It is fully open sourced and can be customized by users. A contributor’s guide is posted to cover how to add documentation, code and report and fix bugs.

Q. Will SONiC have binaries?

A. We will build some binaries, use binaries from existing Linux distributions and in some cases just release source code. The getting started guide covers how to build, install and configure SONiC .

Q. Where can I download SONiC?

A. Please head to our landing page for all details regarding SONiC: http://azure.github.io/SONiC/

Q. Is SONiC a supported product?

A. SONiC is a community supported product. Microsoft is interested in keeping SONiC relevant, reliable and stable. We run it in our own network.

###CONTRIBUTING Q. Can anyone contribute to SONiC?

A. Yes, SONiC collaborates and welcome open community involvement. Please check the contributors guide for details: https://github.com/Azure/SONiC/wiki

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