qemu

I use Vagrant with the vagrant-libvirt plugin on my Arch Linux host quite extensively to quickly spin up dev and lab environments. The plugin’s development is mature and generally feature-complete, but the latest release was June 24, 2023. In the meantime, multiple commits were added to the main branch. I use the following process rather than the standard installation sourced from RubyGems . Prerequisites Verify these Arch packages are installed: pacman -Q git vagrant dnsmasq iptables-nft libvirt qemu-base bridge-utils ruby pkgconf gcc make Steps Open your favorite terminal emulator. ...

The content in this post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. All software rights belong to their respective owners. The Cisco IOSv and IOSv L2 devices could be considered the standard for learning Cisco routing and switching in the confines of a virtual network environment. They’re light in resource usage and contain a vast feature set. Prerequisites Cisco Modeling Labs subscription GNS3 with macOS on Apple Silicon macOS Point your web browser to the CML Software Download page. ...

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. ...

Vagrant supports three types of networks: public, private, and port-forwarding. The private network type has the option to use a UDP tunnel for a point-to-point link when using the vagrant-libvirt plugin. This connection type is ideal for links between virtual network devices. Refer to the following resources if you need more information: Pseudo-wires With Vagrant and Libvirt vagrant-libvirt Networks Vagrant Private Networks The only drawback with this type of connection is concerning packet sniffing. Since the connection uses a tunnel for encapsulation, we need a method to view the relevant data within the tunnel somehow. ...

After opening the GNS3 client and starting nodes, we primarily access the remote virtual devices with a console connection. This console connection is either Telnet, VNC, or SPICE. A console connection covers our requirement for physical access to virtual devices, but today, most administrative tasks are carried out with a link to the network management interface . I define the GNS3 server as remote if the gns3server process is not running on the host operating system. I consider the GNS3 VM remote because the gns3server process runs on a guest operating system (Ubuntu). ...