Add Cisco routers for Dynamips to GNS3 on macOS

The information provided in this post is for educational and informational purposes only. All rights to the software used belong to their respective owners.

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.

Want to kick it old school with the Cisco 7200 Series Router?

No problem. You can run 20 virtual instances on your Mac without it even breaking a sweat.

Prerequisite

GNS3 on Apple Silicon

macOS

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.

cp -v ~/Downloads/c????-*.bin ~/GNS3/images/IOS

Change to the IOS directory.

cd ~/GNS3/images/IOS

Uncompress the Cisco image files.

for f in c*.bin; do unzip -p "$f" > "${f%.bin}.image"; rm "$f"; done

output:

warning [c3640-jk9o3s-mz.124-16a.bin]:  28232 extra bytes at beginning or within zipfile
  (attempting to process anyway)
warning [c7200-adventerprisek9-mz.124-24.T5.bin]:  94664 extra bytes at beginning or within zipfile
  (attempting to process anyway)

Ignore the warning messages.

GNS3

Open the GNS3 client application.
Click the Settings button.
Select IOS routers on the left side menu.

Click the New button.
Click the Browse… button.
Navigate to and select a Cisco image file.

I will select c7200-adventerprisek9-mz.124-24.T5.image for my example.

Click the Open button.
Click the Next button after the upload completes.
Click the Next button using the default c7200 for name and platform.
Click the Next button using the default 512 MiB for RAM.
Click the Next button using the default network (port) adapter in slot 0.