Marc Weisel

As of the date of this post, GNS3 doesn’t offer a native GNS3 client for macOS with Apple Silicon - so let’s remedy that. This post is technically a companion to GNS3 on Apple Silicon , but this GNS3 client will also work with other remote GNS3 server types. Prerequisites Mac computer with Apple silicon macOS Sonoma Git Steps Open your favorite terminal emulator. We will be working from the command line for the majority of the following steps....

Dynamips may seem to be a bygone technology for the present day, but it’s still a great solution for learning routing concepts on emulated Cisco router platforms. Prerequisites GNS3 on Apple Silicon GNS3 client Steps Open your favorite terminal emulator. Create the IOS directory. mkdir -p ~/GNS3/images/IOS Copy the Cisco image files to the IOS directory. For my example, I will copy the c3640-jk9o3s-mz.124-16a.bin and c7200-adventerprisek9-mz.124-24.T5.bin image files from my Downloads directory....

iTerm2 is my primary terminal emulator for macOS, but I prefer to use a separate terminal emulator for GNS3 console (telnet) connections. After a little bit of research, I decided on Alacritty . It’s lightweight and supports the command line options we need for GNS3. There are several different ways to install Alacritty and Telnet, but I use MacPorts in this post. Steps Open your favorite terminal emulator (besides Alacritty 😉)....

The Cisco IOSv and IOSv L2 devices could be considered the standard for learning Cisco routing and switching in the confines of a virtual network environment. They’re light in resource usage and contain a vast feature set. Let’s now add them to our GNS3 device inventory. Prerequisites Cisco Modeling Labs subscription GNS3 on Apple Silicon GNS3 client Steps Point your web browser to the CML Software Download page. Click the Download icon for Cisco Modeling Labs reference platform ISO file (February 2024)....

Cisco recently made the IOS on Linux (IOL) images publicly available via their Cisco Modeling Labs (CML) subscription. This post provides the steps of how to add them to GNS3 on macOS. Prerequisites Cisco Modeling Labs subscription GNS3 on Apple Silicon GNS3 client Steps Point your web browser to the CML Software Download page. Click the Download icon for Cisco Modeling Labs reference platform ISO file (February 2024). Log in with your Cisco....

Before we work our way through the steps, I will start by pointing out GNS3 server has the following constraints when running on Apple Silicon: Lack of Linux KVM for x86_64 virtualized guests Slight performance penalty with emulated x86_64 Linux binaries (Rosetta ) GNS3 is viable even with these limitations. I’m amazed with the stability and performance considering the Linux operating system and virtual network devices are running on a different CPU architecture....

Though remote development is not available out of the box for Sublime Text, we can enable a form of it with the sublime-rsync-ssh package. This versatile plugin has many features and options, but this post will focus solely on syncing a single local folder to a remote folder. I recommend you peruse the README for more information. Prerequisites Sublime Text with macOS is used in the examples, but it’s still applicable for Windows and Linux....

Vagrant supports three types of networks: public, private, and port-forwarding. The private network type has the option to use a UDP tunnel for a point-to-point link when using the vagrant-libvirt plugin. This connection type is ideal for links between virtual network devices. Refer to the following resources if you need more information: Pseudo-wires With Vagrant and Libvirt vagrant-libvirt Networks Vagrant Private Networks The only drawback with this type of connection is concerning packet sniffing....

After opening the GNS3 client and starting nodes, we primarily access the remote virtual devices with a console connection. This console connection is either Telnet, VNC, or SPICE. A console connection covers our requirement for physical access to the virtual devices, but today most administrative tasks are carried out with a link to the network management interface . I define the GNS3 server as remote if the gns3server process is not running on the host operating system....

Why not add the CSR 1000v to round out our collection of Cisco virtual appliances? Similar to the Cisco Nexus 9000v, each instance of the Cisco CSR 1000v requires a considerable amount of hardware resources to run. Again, I recommend a Mac with at least 16GB of memory and a dual-core CPU if you plan to run more than a single instance. Ingredients used in this guide: macOS Mojave (10....