In the recent years, virtualization technology has advanced to the point that nearly everything can be virtualized. Started from server and storage virtualizations, to (SDN), the entire datacenter technology is trending to the direction of moving away from physical infrastructure. 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. There are several network simulation and emulation tools available, for example, Packet Tracer, GNS3, Cisco VIRL, Cisco IOU and UNetLab. I have used them all.

• Free Cisco Ios Image Download

Cisco Ios Collection For Gns3 And Actual Routers. Guys, I'm sharing with you FTP Direct Download links for Cisco IOS Images which can be used with GNS3 or actual routers. Small Collection of IOS Images. Therefor, we need Cisco IOU (IOS on Unix) to add Layer 2 or Layer 3 switches. Below steps will guide you to configure IOU Switch in GNS3: Importing an Cisco IOU Image in GNS3. First of all you need Cisco IOU Switch image with Licence given by Cisco. To add IOU switch, first you needs to import IOU Switch image to GNS3.

They all have their advantages and disadvantages. 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. GNS3 and Cisco IOU is a well-known free network simulation platform that has been around for many years. Cisco IOS on UNIX (IOU) is another option for running Cisco routers in virtual environment. It is a fully working version of IOS that runs as a user mode UNIX (Solaris) process.

IOU was built as a native Solaris image and runs just like any other program. One key advantage that Cisco IOU has is that it does not require nearly as much resources as GNS3 and VIRL would require. However, the legality of the source of Cisco images for GNS3 is questionable. If you are not an authorized Cisco employee or trusted partner, usage of Cisco IOU is potentially a legal gray area. 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.

Also, due to missing features and delays in supporting the recent Cisco image releases, Cisco is not recommending them to engineers and students. Here Comes Cisco VIRL Cisco Virtual Internet Routing Lab is a software tool Cisco developed to build and run network simulations without the need for physical hardware. 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.

VIRL provides a scalable, extensible network design and simulation environment using the VM Maestro front-end. Recently, I have seen extensive development and improvement made on the browser based operations using HTML5. VIRL also has extensive ability to integrate with third-party vendor virtual machines such as Juniper, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, F5 BigIP, Extreme Networks, Arista, Alcatel, Citrix and more. VIRL comes in two different editions – Personal Edition and Academic Edition. Both have the same features except the Academic Edition is cheaper. At the time of writing, Academic Edition costs $79.99 USD per year and Personal Edition costs $199.99 USD per year.

VIRL has a license limit to simulate up to 20 Cisco nodes at a time. You can pay an extra $100 USD to upgrade to 30 Cisco nodes, maximum. To qualify to purchase the Academic Edition, you must be faculty, staff and students of any public or private K-12 institution or Higher Education institution.

Cisco VIRL is community-supported and is designed for individual users. For enterprise users who want TAC support, in-depth documentation, training and more, there is (CML), an enterprise version of VIRL. Of course the CML version costs much more. Why VIRL is Better Than GNS3 Official Cisco images VIRL comes with a complete set of legal and licensed Cisco IOS images that are the same as those running on physical routers. (I’m sure there were tweaks done to optimize them running in a virtual environment) The new Cisco IOS releases are provided in a regular basis. Runs on Most Computers The minimum hardware requirement for VIRL is an Intel-based computer with four (not physical CPUs), 8GB of RAM and 70 GB free disk space.

Most of the recent computers come with Intel i5 and i7 processors have four cores (with some exception). Of course more resources allow for larger simulations. Cisco suggests larger memory, such as 12GB for 20 nodes, 15GB for 30 nodes, or 18GB for 40 nodes. Each Cisco IOS-XRv node requires 3GB of memory to launch. In my experience, the only thing that is likely to stop you is the amount of memory installed on the computer. Computer memory is now inexpensive. You just need to ensure that your computer has enough empty slots to install additional memory.

Flexible Installation Options You can install a VIRL on an enterprise-grade server infrastructure, a desktop computer, a laptop, or even on the cloud. You can, Player or VMware. As opposed to running on a hypervisor, some choose to build VIRL on a bare-metal computer to achieve maximum performance.

Once your VIRL lab is up and running, it is an all-in-one virtual networking lab that has no wires and cords attached. When you run it as a VM, you can scale, migrate and implement high availability (HA) by taking advantage of the features that VMware infrastructure has to offer. Automatic Configuration The AutoNetkit, which comes with VIRL, can assign IP addresses to the nodes automatically when they launch, and it will even set up some basic routing protocols for you. The bootstrap configuration gives you a fully converged network as soon as they are launched.

And you can go straight to the features and focus on what you want to test. This is a cool feature for network engineers who want to set up a one-time temporary environment to look up commands and test certain features.

If you were building a network topology from scratch, or creating a mockup a production environment, manual IP addressing is recommended. Community Support by Developers VIRL is supported by a full of good people like you. Questions are often answered first-hand by developers and engineers. The Cisco VIRL team offers monthly webinars and newsletters to keep the community updated on new feature releases and announcements. You can find the online community on.

Conclusion I wish VIRL were available when I first started learning Cisco networking technology and taking CCIE exams. I have used GNS3, IOU and other simulation and emulation tools. They all had their advantages and disadvantages. When looking at them together, there are four main reasons I recommend VIRL to network engineers, certification students and trainers.

Developed by Cisco, running official Cisco images. No concerns about legal or software licensing issues. Has a production-grade, commercial version (CML – ) available to enterprise customers. It runs essentially the same code as VIRL. Cisco has made VIRL much more affordable for personal and academic use, without the price tag and TAC support. Why not take advantage of it?. Runs on and is SDN-ready.

Free Cisco Ios Image Download

If you are interested in learning about Software Defined Network, VIRL has direct integration with. Being actively developed by Cisco. New features and updates are released regularly. One issue I found about Cisco VIRL is that it is a fairly complicated tool with a lot of features built-in.

Instead of using VIRL and start right away building labs and studying networking technologies, much of the time were spend figuring out how certain features work and troubleshooting issues I have came across on the platform. To help other VIRL users, I have documented step-by-step how to get VIRL installed and configured, the issues I have struggled with in to a book. It is an all-in-one resource for engineers and certification students to get Cisco VIRL up and running painlessly, and eventually mastering the tool to build any lab environment quickly.

I wish I had this as a resource when I was first starting out. The is available in Kindle and paperback format.