cisco VIRL

Everybody pretty much heard of  GNS3, but cisco has came on the scene with VIRL. It's not cheap nor expensive, but does requires a virtual-player since it's VM based.

http://virl.cisco.com/

It 's a great simulator if you want to take off where GNS3 has left out. It also allows you to try out other cisco OSes that you might not have access to such as;

    IOS-XR
   NXOS
   ASA


I believe GNS3 was the main reason cisco wanted to have means for impacting into the virtual-network-simulation world. Let's face it, cisco IOU was a disaster, but a good & right step for cisco to take.

Juniper start Olive and I believe Arista had a similar offering but in-house only for AristaNET personnel. The VIRLCML is not the next peak in the virtual lab and testing and from one of the biggest network company in NA  ( cisco ).

I hope HP, Juniper and other take  the same path. It would be nice to see a 3rd party software  company develop a universal multi platform simulator.

( hint.....
) 


A systems that would allows you purchase a network-simulator and enable OSes by license. I vision  this will come around sooner or later & hopefully b4 I die.

If we can control a unmanned drone 4k miles away in Syria, and drop a  hellfire on ISIS truck with pinpoint accuracy, I'm sure we could built a software system for doing a lab/simulations for various network OSes on one plane.

It would be nice to have a VirLAB-Simulator that supported firewalls types and similar to a  paid cable-subscription and we just  enabled  PAN-OS, FortiOS, ASA, Junos, etc.....as required.

Also we should be able to buy a reduce support contract or software updates and application support. This way you could keep up with new release and features.

Ken Felix

NSE ( network security expert) and Route/Switching Engineer
kfelix  -----a----t---- socpuppets ---dot---com

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