Virl

bout2k

Anyone use Cisco VIRL? I'm considering purchasing it to study for the Route Exam.

virl.cisco.com

Thank you

EdTheLad

I prefer to use IOU or XR4U, i find VIRL hogs too much cpu.

fredrikjj

I'm using it at the moment and what I like the most about it is the automatic configuration tool that can assign IP addresses and routing protocols to all devices. It's ideal for quickly testing a particular topology. Another cool thing is getting (legitimate) access to IOSv, which is probably the best way to run IOS at the moment. Though, as far as I know, there are no crippling bugs in 15.4 IOU either so that would work just as well.

What I don't like is that it's using more resources than simply running IOSv, XRv, etc, as standalone VMs. I have 16 GB of RAM and that gets used up pretty quickly if the heavy hitters like XRv or CSR1000v are used. Part of the reason is that I haven't tuned the RAM usage per instance (you can decrease it from certain default values), but I also think that it has something to do with how memory is handled by the virtualization platform itself. If I turn on "allow most virtual machine memory to be swapped" I can load surprisingly many XRvs as individual VMs in Workstation even if each individual one is supposed to use 3 GB of RAM. That kind of memory sharing among VMs seems to be less effective in VIRL, and it's just one VM after all so it's something that would have to be accomplished from within.

You don't need this product, and it doesn't do anything mind blowing from what I can tell, but it's pretty cool. If you just wanted to pass the route exam, you could just use GNS3 or one of the IOU packages (Web-IOU, or that new one that I've forgotten the name of) as long as you have no moral qualms about operating in a legal gray area, depending on what country you live in.