docker

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 13.0 or later Git Steps Download OrbStack and open it. Open your favorite terminal emulator. We will work from the command line for the following steps. ...

Most GNS3 users are familiar with VPCS . It’s the go-to device for simulating a simple endpoint node in our network labs. VPCS is suitable for the basics, but Docker supplies a selection of more feature-rich endpoint types. This post provides an example using Alpine Linux . Prerequisites GNS3 with macOS on Apple Silicon GNS3 client Steps Open your favorite terminal emulator. Download the latest alpine Docker image from Docker Hub . ...

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 ) The following are my results after testing a number of different Cisco device types: Device Working? Information IOL ✅ - IOL L2 ✅ - IOSv ✅ - IOSv L2 ✅ - ASAv ❌ Requires SSSE3 CPU instructions for cryptographic operations Catalyst 8000V ❌ Requires vmx or svm CPU flag for Linux KVM Nexus 9000v ❌ Requires vmx or svm CPU flag for Linux KVM As you can see, we’re primarily limited to Cisco (IOL , IOSv , Dynamips ) images, VPCS, and Docker containers. The upside is that we’re rarely CPU-bound running labs on Apple Silicon. The amount of system memory in the Mac is usually the limiting factor. And let’s face it: connecting to a dedicated x86_64 GNS3 compute server with ample CPU cores and RAM is the ideal solution for running large labs. ...