The content in this post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. All software rights belong to their respective owners. Cisco recently made the IOS on Linux (IOL) images available through the Cisco Modeling Labs (CML) Free Tier . IOL is an implementation of Cisco IOS-XE that operates as an executable binary on Linux. This post will guide you through the process of creating Cisco IOL container images using Containerlab on macOS. ...
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. ...
The content in this post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. All software rights belong to their respective owners. I’ve read quite a few tutorials on Netmiko with GNS3, but none of them show you how to directly utilize the console connection as the management interface for Cisco devices. In addition to the CiscoIosSSH driver, Kirk Byers also implemented the CiscoIosTelnet driver for establishing a connection to a Cisco device. This is perfect for GNS3 because the default console connection is essentially a Telnet connection without authentication. ...
The content in this post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. All software rights belong to their respective owners. Cisco recently made the IOS on Linux (IOL) images available through the Cisco Modeling Labs (CML) Free Tier . IOL is an implementation of Cisco IOS-XE that operates as an executable binary on Linux. This post will guide you through the process of adding Cisco IOL devices using GNS3 on macOS. ...
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. ...