Sunday, November 1, 2015

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

     ^      ^
=(  @  @ )=
         o 
        /  \

2 comments:

  1. Puzzled..

    Have you not been in JunoSphere? Its been around a lot longer than VIRL. They give away time occasionally, especially as part of their configuration challenges.

    I don't think Juniper 'started' Olive. I believe it was a way for Juniper developers to test out code on RE's without having to have the FPC/SSB hardware to twiddle, it'll just run the most basic software packet forwarding. They probably found it useful to keep around, and then people discovered the RE code ran outside an RE.

    Likewise, Arista vEOS probably found it easy enough to run EOS virtually and ignore that they didn't have the commodity switching chipsets to twiddle. Then officially expanded to a product of vEOS. Initially only customers could get vEOS, but they opened it up to anybody a few years ago.

    I think Fortinet with FortiGate-VMX is starting to get to your level of just spin up a firewall that you want MTM, but I'm sure it'll be closer to FortiNet-VM pricing, than say Veeam VCSP pricing.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Roo yes I 'm aware of junosphere. My blog post was not that of comparing a cloud based lab to cisco or even gns3, they are not the same. The goal of this post was to show where cisco has dropped the IOU and has move on host router simulator lab that runs on a local host & to make other aware of yet alternative choice. I 'm been running it on a Macbook Air for restarting my CCIE labs and it's pretty much stable.

    ReplyDelete