GNS3 and IOU

DevilWAH

Are many people using GNS3 with IOU and the GNS3VM?

Fired it up for the first time last week and really liking IOU especially the L2 stuff! I was planning on creating a TShoot topology this week based on the old GNS3 Dayanips one that CBT nuggets amongst others have circulated. But with all the switch and ether channel links so its closer to the real deal.

Unless of course any one knows if there is already one about.

negru_tudor

Yeap, it's really cool the amount of stuff you can do with GNS3 and IOU nowadays. L3 Etherchannels crash if you don't disable CEF and there're no "mls qos" commands etc. but you're into QoS the MQC model is pretty much solid on L2 IOU images.

DevilWAH

negru_tudor wrote: »

Yeap, it's really cool the amount of stuff you can do with GNS3 and IOU nowadays. L3 Etherchannels crash if you don't disable CEF and there're no "mls qos" commands etc. but you're into QoS the MQC model is pretty much solid on L2 IOU images.

and no more worrying about the idle PC values

I currently running a lab with 21 devices and the current CPU uterlisation is <10% Once I have Tshoot under-my belt I think i will recreate the company network in it entirety and see how that goes. that is about 180 devices in total. I have to merge 2 separate networks moving forward so be great to be able to have it all in a test environment some thing I could never do with old GNS3 before IOU (or not with out a lot of mucking around to get it to work)

esr0159

try to look for updated IOU (L2 and L3) some of the new feature works there

ande0255

Is GNS3 the best emulator at this point in time? I'm going to be moving, and as much as I love my physical lab, I think it's time to let go - So I am looking for a good substitute before I give away my beloved routers and switches to a fellow engineer at my work who asked me about them.

Thanks!

Danielh22185

100% of my lab study was over GNS3 for Route and ~80%+ of my lab study was over GNS3 IOU for Switch.

ande0255

If I may ask, is GNS3 IOU a different emulator application, or different images for the virtual device?

I am currently using 12.x image on most of my equipment which is all legacy stuff (2600 / 1800 series routers), is there an IOS for routers and switches that is best to use when labbing?

I have only used GNS3 once before in its infancy on a crappy laptop, so the router emulator stuff is going to be a whole new ball of yarn for me to untangle, sounds like it's a lot easier to use or stable than it once was when I used it.

Any tips would be great, and much appreciated.

EDIT:

Also I see you passed your SWITCH almost 2 years after your ROUTE exam, and was wondering if you retained the material enough to pass TSHOOT, or if you had to go over the ROUTE material all over again?

negru_tudor

ande0255 wrote: »

If I may ask, is GNS3 IOU a different emulator application, or different images for the virtual device?

I am currently using 12.x image on most of my equipment which is all legacy stuff (2600 / 1800 series routers), is there an IOS for routers and switches that is best to use when labbing?

I have only used GNS3 once before in its infancy on a crappy laptop, so the router emulator stuff is going to be a whole new ball of yarn for me to untangle, sounds like it's a lot easier to use or stable than it once was when I used it.

Any tips would be great, and much appreciated.

EDIT:

Also I see you passed your SWITCH almost 2 years after your ROUTE exam, and was wondering if you retained the material enough to pass TSHOOT, or if you had to go over the ROUTE material all over again?

Hi

You can think of IOU like a different version of IOS but compiled for UNIX/LINUX.

The way GNS3 runs nowadays is you load something called the GNS3 VM (Virtual Machine) onto VMware Workstation or Virtualbox. This is nothing more than a Linux machine which will provide the emulation container for your IOS and IOU devices. This was done because Windows wasn't the ideal OS to run emulation so they moved to this instead.

Then, you install GNS3 onto your Windows PC and just configure it to use the GNS3 VM as the "work horse". There are several step-by-step guides on how you can configure these / get them to work out there.

Once you've done the config, you can run IOS and IOU devices onto the GNS3 VM and using GNS3 on your PC as GUI mostly. IOU images you'll have to find on your own and you'll also need a license generated so that IOU runs on your GNS3 VM.

Good luck!

ande0255

Thanks for the helpful answer, I fortunately have a laptop setup with workstation 10 and 16gb RAM for my VCP 5 studies, I will check out some setup vids.

+ Rep for giving me the low down, appreciated!