About GNS3

Yaser Rahmati | یاسر رحمتی

GNS3 is used by hundreds of thousands of network engineers worldwide to emulate, configure, test and troubleshoot virtual and real networks. GNS3 allows you to run a small topology consisting of only a few devices on your laptop, to those that have many devices hosted on multiple servers or even hosted in the cloud.

Testing networks

Today, you have multiple choices when studying and testing networks:

  1. GNS3

  2. Cisco Packet Tracer

  3. Cisco VIRL

  4. Physical equipment

  5. Others

  6. GNS3 Ethernet Switch

GNS3 Advantages

  1. Free software

  2. Open Source software

  3. No monthly or yearly license fees

  4. No limitation on number of devices supported (only limitation is your hardware: CPU and memory)

  5. Supports multiple switching options (ESW16 Etherswitch, IOU/IOL Layer 2 images, VIRL IOSvL2):

  6. Supports all VIRL images (IOSv, IOSvL2, IOS-XRv, CSR1000v, NX-OSv, ASAv)

  7. Supports multi vendor environments

  8. Can be run with or without hypervisors

  9. Supports both free and paid hypervisors (Virtualbox, VMware workstation, VMware player, ESXi, Fusion)

  10. Downloadable, free, pre-configured and optimized appliances available to simplify deployment

  11. Native support for Linux without the need for need for additional virtualization software

  12. Software from multiple vendors freely available

  13. Large and active community (800,000+ members)

Disadvantages:

  1. Cisco images need to be supplied by user (download from Cisco.com, or purchase VIRL license, or copy from physical device).

  2. Not a self contained package, but requires a local installation of software (GUI).

  3. GNS3 can be affected by your PC’s setup and limitations because of local installation (firewall and security settings, company laptop policies etc).

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