The content in this post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. All software rights 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?

 

Good news: your Mac can easily handle running multiple virtual instances at once.

Twenty c7200 routers

Prerequisite

macOS

  1. Open your favorite terminal emulator.

  2. Create the IOS directory.

mkdir -p ~/GNS3/images/IOS
  1. 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
  1. Change to the IOS directory.
cd ~/GNS3/images/IOS
  1. 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

  1. Open the GNS3 client application.

  2. Click the Settings button.

  3. Select IOS routers on the left side menu.

IOS routers

  1. Click the New button.

  2. Click the Browse… button.

  3. Navigate to and select a Cisco image file.

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

Select Cisco image

  1. Click the Open button.

  2. Click the Next button after the upload completes.

  3. Click the Next button using the default c7200 for name and platform.

  4. Click the Next button using the default 512 MiB for RAM.

  5. Click the Next button using the default network (port) adapter in slot 0.

c7200 network adapter
  1. Click the Finish button using the computed Idle-PC value.
c7200 Idle-PC

  1. Click the Edit button for the c7200 template.

  2. Enter :/symbols/affinity/circle/blue/router.svg for the Symbol value.

  3. Click the OK button.

  4. Click the Apply button to save the template configuration.

Dynamips device template
  1. Click the OK button to close the GNS3 Preferences window.