Containerlab with macOS on Apple Silicon

Containerlab is rapidly emerging as a viable solution on macOS, thanks to the increasing availability of ARM64-based NOS container images. The following Containerlab kinds work excellent with macOS on Apple Silicon: Nokia SR Linux Arista cEOS Cisco IOL with Rosetta Prerequisites Mac computer with Apple silicon macOS 14.0 or later Git uv Steps Download OrbStack and open it. Open your favorite terminal emulator. ...

February 7, 2025 · 2 min

GNS3 with macOS on Apple Silicon

Hosting a local GNS3 server inside an OrbStack Linux machine on Apple Silicon offers a flexible networking lab environment, though it introduces a few key constraints: No x86_64 KVM virtualization: Hardware acceleration is unavailable for nested x86_64 VMs. Emulation overhead: Running x86_64 Linux binaries relies on Rosetta emulation, introducing a slight performance penalty. Network limitation: OrbStack uses a custom-built virtual network stack that does not support bridged networking . The Cloud and NAT nodes will not function. Note: QEMU and libvirt are disabled due to these constraints. ...

April 29, 2024 · 4 min

GNS3 with Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure is one of the big three public cloud computing providers for services such as virtual machines (VMs), containers, server-less computing, and machine learning. Azure is a large platform, but we’re focused solely on the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) resources in this guide. The GNS3 architecture is comprised of three primary components: User Interface (UI), Controller, and the (Compute) Server. The Server is the component that puts a strain on computer hardware resources. The more routers, switches, firewalls, and servers we add to our GNS3 topologies, the more CPU, RAM, and data storage we require. We usually come to a point where the hardware requirements of our GNS3 labs may exceed what our laptops and desktops can deliver. ...

September 24, 2018 · 11 min