Cisco VIRL Experience

I've been using real Cisco equipment in my network labs for a while now and to a certain extent, especially when starting out, I firmly believe there is no substitute, however, over the past couple of years I have started to virtualize a lot of my lab.

A lot of this effort was driven by the need to use servers like LDAP, DNS, DHCP as a part of the lab network. Having a spare PC that I could use to run a number of virtual servers was handy. In fact the first PC I used for this was a Core2Duo machine with 8GB of ram in an SFF case! Not exactly a power house but did exactly what I needed.

So how does this relate to Cisco's VIRL? As I progressed in my studies, I started to need appliances and devices that I could not purchase inexpensively on ebay. Machines like the Cisco Nexus switch were ( and still are) way out of my price range for a lab. Not to mention, I don't really have the space for a 7k chassis!

Which is where VIRL comes in. The application allows the use of real Cisco images, legally, that can run on a PC. I have tried all three versions over the past 12 months. Initially I used the ESXI version on the aforementioned Core2Duo most, under ESXi 5 and 5.5 but that was not satisfactory. This was late 2016 and I found the use of Maestro horrible at best.

I then attempted an install on my i5 desktop under VMWare Workstation 12 and that wasn't much better. In both cases the issues were the NIC configs which seemed extremely picky and often failed, and the communication between Maestro and the VIRL server.

Eventually I settled on a dedicated host with a bare metal install which worked very well. Once I had this working, I found the simulator quite satisfactory.

Fast forward to October 2017 and I am looking at reducing the physical size of my lab. I hadn't used VIRL for a few months and decided to get it up and running again. So first I check to see if there are new versions and there are! Not only are there new versions, but it appears that Cisco have really trimmed the fat a lot. I opted to down load the new 1 NIC VMWare Workstation version and install on my desktop machine. This was much easier than in the past, and the VIRL server appears to use considerably less resource than its previous versions. This has enabled me to eliminate the stand alone VIRL server, eliminating an entire box from the lab.

So far I have only managed to perform one quick simulation but from that I was able to say that it is still slow to start and stop (i5, 32GB RAM and 256GB SSD) but certainly fit for purpose for my needs.