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:...
The information provided in this post is for educational and informational purposes only. All rights to the software used 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 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....
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....
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 the 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....