What's the best NIC for briding a GNS3 network with real switches?

Magik Smoke

Hi All! First post here.

I'm a former CCNA "re-certifying" via 640-822/816. This is my first time playing with GNS3 but I have a "real hardware" test rack.

4x 2651s
2x 2950s (running the crypto/SSH image)
1x 3550 (running the L3 image)

I want to bridge my virtual GNS3 topology(frame relay) out to my switch stack and back to the same PC running a VirtualBox end node.

This leads to a couple of questions:
A) Does anyone know of a good "How-To" for this task?

Some of my reading suggests that Vlan Tagging with sub-interfaces is possible... but only with the correct NICs.
Which NIC hardware best supports what I want to do?

Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

hiddenknight821

If you like Linux, then I think you should give this a try. Linux Bridging for GNS3 LAN communications

I don't think what you are asking has anything to do with the "correct" NICs. As long as you are connecting it to any type of Ethernet interface on the routers/switches in GNS3, then it should work. Connecting your PC's NIC to an actual router's WIC-1DSU-T1-V2 interface will probably not work.

Magik Smoke

hiddenknight821 wrote: »

If you like Linux, then I think you should give this a try. Linux Bridging for GNS3 LAN communications

I don't think what you are asking has anything to do with the "correct" NICs. As long as you are connecting it to any type of Ethernet interface on the routers/switches in GNS3, then it should work. Connecting your PC's NIC to an actual router's WIC-1DSU-T1-V2 interface will probably not work.

Thanks, I had not seen that. ... I got a little ahead of myself. This is a windows host OS and the VBox guest is XP.

I think I'm running into issues visualizing layer one. My virtual topology gives me UP/Down and I'm not passing anything to my real switch (also UP/Down)... (Cleared counters are all zeros) A simplified topology without VLANs works fine and the same configs without virtual routers are all passing traffic.

GNS3 is going to "force" me to get a Linux Cert before I finish my CCNA

hiddenknight821

Magik Smoke wrote: »

Thanks, I had not seen that. ... I got a little ahead of myself. This is a windows host OS and the VBox guest is XP.

I think I'm running into issues visualizing layer one. My virtual topology gives me UP/Down and I'm not passing anything to my real switch (also UP/Down)... (Cleared counters are all zeros) A simplified topology without VLANs works fine and the same configs without virtual routers are all passing traffic.

GNS3 is going to "force" me to get a Linux Cert before I finish my CCNA

I rather use Linux over Windows 7 when I use GNS3, because I get to save more RAM and CPU. I can use whatever left for the VBoxes with XP guests. You should give Linux a try since GNS3 is often more stable under it. Now that you mentioned this, I need to give Windows a try again to see if I run into any trouble or not. I will let you know if it's successful, but I know many who can accomplish this on Windows.

UPDATE: By the way, what exactly are you trying to bridge? I hope you are talking about bridging your NIC to a FastEthernet interface on one of the routers connected to a "Frame Relay" switch in a hub-and-spoke topology in GNS3. I don't think you can bridge your real router to your virtual "Frame Relay" switch since that would require serial connections.

UPDATE 2: I gave up. I couldn't get every routers to IDLE. Must be because I'm on 64-bit. Not sure though. So I will stick with Ubuntu instead to make this less easier.

Magik Smoke

hiddenknight821 wrote: »

I rather use Linux over Windows 7 when I use GNS3, because I get to save more RAM and CPU. I can use whatever left for the VBoxes with XP guests. You should give Linux a try since GNS3 is often more stable under it. Now that you mentioned this, I need to give Windows a try again to see if I run into any trouble or not. I will let you know if it's successful, but I know many who can accomplish this on Windows.

UPDATE: By the way, what exactly are you trying to bridge? I hope you are talking about bridging your NIC to a FastEthernet interface on one of the routers connected to a "Frame Relay" switch in a hub-and-spoke topology in GNS3. I don't think you can bridge your real router to your virtual "Frame Relay" switch since that would require serial connections.

UPDATE 2: I gave up. I couldn't get every routers to IDLE. Must be because I'm on 64-bit. Not sure though. So I will stick with Ubuntu instead to make this less easier.

No I wasn't trying to bridge a serial interface across ethernet. The simplified topology looks like this:

[Real Win7 host(NIC1)]<---->[(Fa 0/1)Real router(S0/0)]<--"WAN" link->[(S1/0) Real Frame Switch(Fa0/0]<--->[VBox VM(NIC2)]

I can actually ping host to VM with this through the "cloud."


Then I added a real switch, a couple sub-interfaces/VLANs and duplicated my frame setup virtually.
... and wasted a whole day of study confusing myself. I can toggle the switchport mode(on the 3550) now and it will kill everything.

The logical topology of the setup looks like a ball of yarn right now. Trying to visualize it is giving me a headache.
I'm going to try to export this topology to Ubuntu and see if it still pukes.

Thank you again.

Netwurk

I wouldn't worry about the NIC, any speed bottleneck will come from the GNS3 software. You real equipment is much faster and will have no problem connecting as long as you set up your GNS3 cloud properly.

GNS3 Box ---- Switch ---- Router or any device(s) on the same VLAN and subnet as the GNS3 box

alxx

If you're having trouble visualizing it, diagram and label it before starting

Ubuntu isn't the only Linux option.i prefer fedora.
Centos 6(freeware version of red hat 6) is another option.

Diagramming options on Linux aren't as nice, unless I've missed a program or two?

hiddenknight821

alxx wrote: »

If you're having trouble visualizing it, diagram and label it before starting

Ubuntu isn't the only Linux option.i prefer fedora.
Centos 6(freeware version of red hat 6) is another option.

Diagramming options on Linux aren't as nice, unless I've missed a program or two?

Agree. Diagrams would be helpful for us to see where you are getting at. Like alxx suggested, you can use other distros, but not all distros are the same since the packaging/installation and directories may be slightly different. The Blindhog.net guide I posted earlier would work for Debian-based distro only, and you will probably have a hard time translating it for your Red-Hat distro if you don't have any previous experience with it. Check out the Linux Distribution Timeline at this Wiki link to get a better idea.

Netwurk

Why all the Linux talk? Linux rocks, but GNS3 works well with Windows too

Magik Smoke

Well, I had a non-virtual switch <--> switch trunk issue. The vlan's didn't match because of VTP Domains. (I forgot to change one)

I would have to agree that the LINUX version of GNS3 has a slightly lighter "footprint" than the Win7/XP GNS3... but that wasn't the issue. I'm just not quite ready to be running the topology I was running...

Thanks to all that helped. I really like this forum.