VIRL provides a scalable, extensible network design and simulation environment using the VM Maestro front-end. Under the hood, VIRL is an OpenStack-based platform that runs IOSv, IOSvL2, IOS XRv, NX-OSv, CSR1000v, and ASAv software images on the built-in hypervisor. Here Comes Cisco VIRLĬisco Virtual Internet Routing Lab ( VIRL) is a software tool Cisco developed to build and run network simulations without the need for physical hardware. Also, due to missing features and delays in supporting the recent Cisco image releases, Cisco is not recommending them to engineers and students. Because of lack of publicity and availability to average certification students and network engineers, online resources are limited and setting up a network takes much more effort. If you are not an authorized Cisco employee or trusted partner, usage of Cisco IOU is potentially a legal gray area. However, the legality of the source of Cisco images for GNS3 is questionable. One key advantage that Cisco IOU has is that it does not require nearly as much resources as GNS3 and VIRL would require. IOU was built as a native Solaris image and runs just like any other program. It is a fully working version of IOS that runs as a user mode UNIX (Solaris) process. Cisco IOS on UNIX (IOU) is another option for running Cisco routers in virtual environment. GNS3is a well-known free network simulation platform that has been around for many years. In this article, I will compare Cisco VIRL with the most commonly used GNS3 and explain my top four reasons why Cisco VIRL is better than GNS3. They all have their advantages and disadvantages. There are several network simulation and emulation tools available, for example, Packet Tracer, GNS3, Cisco VIRL, Cisco IOU and UNetLab. If the production network is going virtual, for fellow network engineers, certification students and Cisco Academy trainers, there is no reason to use physical devices for your lab testing and learning purposes. Started from server and storage virtualizations, to Software Defined Networking (SDN), the entire datacenter technology is trending to the direction of moving away from physical infrastructure. Oh that's bad.In the recent years, virtualization technology has advanced to the point that nearly everything can be virtualized. And I would know, because I eat a lot of sandwiches. My current demo laptop, a Core2 Duo T9600 running Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit, VMware Workstation 6.5 and GNS3 is the coolest thing since sliced bread. The install is pretty painless on XP as well, and possible on Vista (though I've read of folks having a lot of issues), but GNS3 runs a lot slower and you won't be able to run as many router instances with XP or Vista. If you are running a recent version of Ubuntu on your demo laptop, installing GNS3 is as simple as sudo apt-get install gns3. A few months back I completely modeled a client's network infrastructure using GNS3, and proved how they could reduce their routing tables by about 10,000 entries by configuring EIGRP route summarization on a single link. Imagine being able to test a change to the Active Directory infrastructure between multiple WAN sites, or verify client connections after changing from a static routing configuration to OSPF. The mind boggles at the thought of all the projects you can test with this setup. To connect a virtual machine to a GNS3 virtual router, just add the virtual network the VM is plugged into in the cloud configuration window, and then create a Fast Ethernet connection to a router. When you configure a cloud object, the vmnet virtual networks appear in the drop down list of available NIO Ethernet objects. The computer shapes are really cloud objects that I've customized the shape for. In the simple diagram above, I've connected two VMs across a virtual WAN link, utilizing two Cisco 3640 routers and OSPF as the dynamic routing protocol. When used in combination with VMware Workstation, connecting your virtual machines up with a GNS3 topology takes about three clicks. Though there have been Cisco emulation packages around for a while, they are usually expensive, and only provide a small fraction of the IOS feature set.īut even if you're not studying for an exam, or have no interest in Cisco IOS, GNS3 is a fantastic tool for testing network and service architecture designs. So what's it good for? Well, there's the obvious if you are studying for a Cisco certification test, GNS3 is like a dream come true. But you're not going to use it in your production environment. It's also free, easy to install, and there are abundant video and written tutorials. Yes, GNS3,, emulates the hardware of several Cisco router platforms, and it will boot real IOS images. This title is a little misleading, I figure I get to do that at least once.
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