Connecting Gns3 VM inside ESXI to ESXI Virtual Switch

Hey Guys,
Has anyone ever connected gns3 vm thats located on your esxi host and use that as your router?

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Look in to the CSR1000v, the guys in the CCIE forum talk about it frequently I think, so I'd do a search for that or head over to the CCIE forums and read a few threads to gather more information on it.

jibbajabba

Never played with gns3, but logically it isn't any different than any other virtual router I don't think

Example of my home lab

A Virtual router has a virtual interface on vSwitch0 (External) and vSwitch1 (Internal) and all VMs are on vSwitch1 going "out" through the router's public interface on vSwitch0.

The tricky bit is probably more like the gns3 setup and not ESXi setup.

d4nz1g

In theory, you just need to map the virtual switch vlans to logical interfaces on your guest SO running gns3, and then map then with cloud interfaces in your topology.

Never tried that, but I would do this way.

DevilWAH

yes its quite possible to create a cloud in GNS3, with multiply connections each to a different port group on the virtual switch. And then in turn assign these port groups to vlan ID.

then simple connect each port on the virtual router to the corresponding port on the cloud object and of you go. the Cloud simple act as an abstract layer between GNS3 and the physical server it is running on.

you can also if you have multiple nic's in the ESXi server set them us as direct IO pass though. They will then appear as nics directly on the VM guest by by passing the ESXi hypervisor.

Now I am not sure how much I would like to use this set up on a production network (or the leagilities of it!!) but it works fine in lab environments.

the only issue is when you are running GNS3 hypervisor / server on one machine and the GUI on a second, then creating clouds and connecting to the physical world you need to think where things are running and what needs to connect to what. it can get a bit tricky at this point.

PS if you want a long running router set up I would test it in GNS3 but run it directly via dynamips with out the GUI as it will be more stable.