VIRL also has extensive ability to integrate with third-party vendor virtual machines such as Juniper, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, F5 BigIP, Extreme Networks, Arista, Alcatel, Citrix and more.Ĭisco VIRL is community-supported and is designed for individual users. Recently, I have seen extensive development and improvement made on the browser based operations using HTML5. VIRL provides a scalable, extensible network design and simulation environment using the VM Maestro front-end.

Under the hood, VIRL is an OpenStack-based platform that runs IOSv, IOSvL2, IOS XRv, NX-OSv, CSR1000v, and ASAv software images on the built-in hypervisor. Here Comes Cisco VIRLĬisco Virtual Internet Routing Lab ( VIRL) is a software tool Cisco developed to build and run network simulations without the need for physical hardware.

Also, due to missing features and delays in supporting the recent Cisco image releases, Cisco is not recommending them to engineers and students. Because of lack of publicity and availability to average certification students and network engineers, online resources are limited and setting up a network takes much more effort.

If you are not an authorized Cisco employee or trusted partner, usage of Cisco IOU is potentially a legal gray area. However, the legality of the source of Cisco images for GNS3 is questionable. One key advantage that Cisco IOU has is that it does not require nearly as much resources as GNS3 and VIRL would require. IOU was built as a native Solaris image and runs just like any other program. It is a fully working version of IOS that runs as a user mode UNIX (Solaris) process. Cisco IOS on UNIX (IOU) is another option for running Cisco routers in virtual environment. GNS3is a well-known free network simulation platform that has been around for many years. In this article, I will compare Cisco VIRL with the most commonly used GNS3 and explain my top four reasons why Cisco VIRL is better than GNS3. They all have their advantages and disadvantages. There are several network simulation and emulation tools available, for example, Packet Tracer, GNS3, Cisco VIRL, Cisco IOU and UNetLab. If the production network is going virtual, for fellow network engineers, certification students and Cisco Academy trainers, there is no reason to use physical devices for your lab testing and learning purposes. Started from server and storage virtualizations, to Software Defined Networking (SDN), the entire datacenter technology is trending to the direction of moving away from physical infrastructure. In the recent years, virtualization technology has advanced to the point that nearly everything can be virtualized.