My Experiences With Ciscos VIRLSince it has been out for more than a year, and has been developed and improved tremendously during that time, I decided to finally take the plunge and buy a years subscription to the Cisco VIRL software. Part 1 Comparing and Tweaking VIRLUntil now, I have been using any combination of real hardware, CSR1. Vs, and IOL instances for studying and proof of concept testing. My first impression of VIRL is that it is a BEAST of a VM with regards to CPU and RAM consumption. I installed it on my 1. GB Mac. Book Pro first, and allocated 8. GB to it. However, its use was very limited as I was unable to load more than a few nodes. I then moved it to my ESXi server, which is definitely more appropriate for this software in its current state. I knew that the CSR1. Vs were fairly RAM hungry, but at the same time they are meant to be production routers, so thats definitely a fair tradeoff for good performance. Cisco Router Ios Image Gns3 Asa' title='Cisco Router Ios Image Gns3 Asa' />Question and answers for CCNA Security Final Exam Version 2. Below is compile list for all questions Final Exam CCNA Secur. ASA httpsccie. lolblog20170108ciscoasaimagedownload IOU IOS. Learn about the history of Cisco Routers, Network Modules, WAN Interface Cards, RAM, FLASH and Cabling and view the best online Cisco Router Comparison matrix. Free Cisco Lab Simulators GNS3 Graphical Network Simulator. GNS3 is a graphical network simulator that allows simulation of complex networks. The IOSv nodes, while they do take up substantially less RAM, are still surprisingly resource intensive, especially with regards to CPU usage. I thought the IOSv nodes were going to be very similar to IOL nodes with regards to resource usage, but unfortunately, that is not yet the case. I can run several tens of instances of IOL nodes on my Mac. Book Pro, and have all of them up and running in less than a minute, all in a VM with only 4. GB of RAM. That is certainly not the case with IOSv. Even after getting the VIRL VM on ESXi tweaked, it still takes about two minutes for the IOSv instances to come up. Reloading or doing a configure replace on IOL takes seconds, whereas IOSv still takes about a minute or more. For this. download GNS3 IOS images before you can perform the handson lab exercises. Click the following direct links to download. I think GNS3 is a great tool but OTT for CCNA. You can use Packet Tracer, a Cisco CCNA lab or my favourite, Boson NetSim. I really believe that you should focus on. I know that in the grand scheme of things, a couple of minutes isnt a big deal, especially if you compare it to reloading an actual physical router or switch, but it was still very surprising to me to see just how much of a performance and resource usage gap there is between IOL and IOSv. Using all default settings, my experience of running VIRL on ESXi after going through the lengthy install process was better than on the MBP, but still not as good as I thought it should have been. The ESXi server I installed VIRL on has two Xeon E5. CPUs, which are Nehalem chips that are each quad core with eight threads. The system also has 4. GB of RAM. I have a few other VMs running that collectively use very little CPU during normal usage, and about 2. GB of RAM, leaving 2. GB for VIRL. I allocated 2. GB to VIRL, and placed the VM on an SSD. The largest share of CPU usage comes from booting the IOSv instances and maybe the other node types as well. The issue is that upon every boot, a crypto process is run and the IOS image is verified. This pegs the CPU at 1. This is what contributes the most to the amount of time the IOSv node takes to finish booting, I believe. This may be improved quite a bit in newer generation CPUs. When I first started, I assigned four cores to the VIRL VM. The IOSv instances would take 5 1. Performing a configure replace took a minimum of five minutes. That was definitely unacceptable, especially when compared to the mere seconds of time it takes for IOL to do the same thing. How To Delete Border Lines In Microsoft Word Software more. I performed a few web searches and found some different things to try. The first thing I did was increase the core count to eight. Since my server only has eight actual cores, I was a little hesitant to do this because of the other VMs I am running, but here is a case where I think Hyper. Threading may make a difference, since ESXi sees 1. After setting the VM to eight cores, I noticed quite a big difference, and my other VMs did not appear to suffer from it. I then read another tweak about assigning proper affinity to the VM. Originally, the VM was presented with eight single core CPUs. I then tried allocating it as a single eight core CPU. The performance increased a little bit. I then allocated it properly as two quad core CPUs matching reality, and this was where I saw the biggest performance increase with regards to both boot time and overall responsiveness. My ESXi server has eight cores running at 2. GHz each, and VMware sees an aggregate of 1. GHz. So, another tweak I performed was to set the VM CPU limit to 1. GHz, so that it could no longer take over the entire server. I also configured the memory so that it could not overcommit. It will not use more than the 2. GB I have allocated to it. Easy Driver Pro Cracked more. In the near future, I intend to upgrade my server from 4. GB to 9. 6GB, so that I can allocate 6. GB to VIRL it is going to be necessary when I start studying service provider topologies using XRv. I should clarify and say that it still doesnt run as well as I think it should, but it is definitely better after tweaking these settings. The Intel Xeon E5. CPUs that are running in my server were released in the first quarter of 2. That is seven years ago, as of this writing. A LOT of improvements have been baked into Xeon CPUs since that time, so I have no doubt that much of the slowness I experienced would be alleviated with newer generation CPUs. I read a comment that said passing the CCIE lab was easier than getting VIRL set up on ESXi. I assure you, that is not the case. The VIRL team has great documentation on the initial ESXi setup, and with regards to that, it worked as it should have without anything extra from their instructions. However, as this post demonstrates, extra tweaks are needed to tune VIRL to your system. It is not a point and click install, but you dont need to study for hundreds of hours to pass the installation, either. VIRL is quite complex and has a lot of different components. It is expected that complex software needs to be tuned to your environment, as there is no way for them to plan in advance a turnkey solution for all environments. Reading over past comments from others, VIRL has improved quite dramatically in the past year, and I expect it will continue to do so, which will most likely include both increased performance and ease of deployment. Part 2 INEs CCIE RSv. Topology on VIRLVIRL topology INE RSv. ATC configs. After getting VIRL set up and tweaked to my particular environment, my next step is to set up INEs CCIE RSv. I will be using VIRL for the most, initially. I was satisfied with using IOL, but I decided to give VIRL a try because it not only has the latest versions of IOS included, it has many other features that IOL in itself isnt going to give you. For example, VIRL includes visualization and automatic configuration options, as well as other features like NX OSv. I was particularly interested in NX OSv since I have also been branching out into datacenter technologies lately, and my company will be migrating a portion of our network to the Nexus platform next year. At this point in time, NX OSv is still quite limited, and doesnt include many of the fancier features of the Nexus platform such as v. PC, but it is still a good starting point to familiarize yourself with the NX OS environment and how its basic operation compares to traditional Cisco IOS. Likewise, I intend to study service provider technologies, and it is nice to have XRv. I configured the INE ATC topology of 1. IOSv routers connected to a single unmanaged switch node. I then added four IOSv L2 nodes, with SW1 connecting to the unmanaged switch node, and then the remaining three L2 nodes interconnected to each other according to the INE diagram. The interface numbering scheme had to change, though. F02. 3 2. 4 became g.