Yesterday INE finally added a Full-Scale LAB in their new CCIE Route and Switching blueprint 5 workbook.
I realized this morning that you maybe don’t want to spend half of your day (like me) configuring this topology in GNS3. Better to just take it from here and start your lab right away.
In my study process for the last year I made almost all my labs from INE on GNS3. In that way I was able to run the labs for more days in a row and not think about the money I would spent on rack rentals. Of course, you will still need some rack rentals particularly for troubleshooting sessions. For troubleshooting you need preconfigured rack because if you configure those topologies by yourself there is a big chance that you will see ticket answers and that will break the point of troubleshooting study process.
All my config sessions were done on GNS3 and this one in the next few days will be also done in GNS3. If you want to spare some time and get the topology ready, up and running in few minutes you can download it at the end of this article.
Read more and download files!
And Remember!
Do the topology by yourself, you will learn more!
From my perspective it’s always better to do the topology by yourself and try to get most things to work connecting all the devices from scratch. Maybe you are thinking now, I don’t want to do this, how can this be better, I will lose a lot of time to get this lab to work!
Yes, maybe you will, but that is the primary reason for learning for the CCIE exam, right? You just love to type in some configs on Cisco devices and get the out a nice and working topology. You will catch yourself thinking Layer2 and then Layer3 and then back to Layer2 and this altogether will be in future crucial to pass the exam.
Long story short, Use my topology, especially if you know the basics and want to go straight to LAB
This topology together with all connections and device configurations is INE R&S Workbook 5 Full-Scale Practice Lab1 created from scratch so the interface names are changed from Gi1 to Gi1/0 and from Gi2 to Gi0/0
All other stuff will probably work. If you see some issues please leave a comment and I will resolve it asap. Now you can simply take this file, unzip it directly to C:\ and start working with GNS3 0.8.6. Please note that I used the path directly to C:\ to avoid issues with IOS and config paths being different on your computer from topology file that is used inside GNS3.
DOWNLOAD (updated)
This is updated download section with GNS3 1.3.7 Project file which will load and work out-of-the-box in newest version of GNS3.
For this topology to work without changes, follow this few steps:
- INE R&S Workbook 5 Full-Scale Practice LAB1 for GNS3 version 1.3.7
- Download the file linked above and extract it directly to root of your C:\
- Open GNS3 and add new ISO image (Edit->Preference)
- In GNS3 open project and select C:\GNS3_1_INElab1\INEvol5fulllab1_GNS1\INEvol5fulllab1_GNS1.gns3
- If anyone is opening the project using Mac OS X GNS3 and running into the “Path to image images\lab1.png doesn’t exist” error:
Edit the project file “INEvol5fulllab1_GNS1.gns3” with a text editor and look for the line “images\\lab1.png”
Change the “\\” to a “/” and save it. The topology should then load correctly when you open it again. (Thanks to Tom Coffeen from ipv6.works for reporting this issue)
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This is the old version prepared to work with GNS prior to GNS1.0
- INE R&S Workbook 5 Full-Scale Practice Lab1
- To make everything work without any tuning of the configuration and topology files I did prepare this in a way that if you unzip the file directly to C:\ it will put there GNS3_INEv5 folder from which you can simply start the topology file.
- If you unzip somewhere else, you will need to change the path for IOS image and config files directory inside topology file. (topology.net)
If there is something that does not work please leave a comment so I will try to fix it. I hope this will help you get started with GNS3 learning.