Tag: lab

Juniper vMX Lab Setup on VMware

This is a description on how to deploy a Juniper LAB of 8 vMX routers and making a simple topology in VMware vSphere environment. vMX is Juniper’s virtual production router so this could be the same procedure for deploying vMX device in production except different number of routers and their interconnection with vSwitch setup.

Juniper vMX router

Two VMs interconnected with VLAN801 – making one Juniper vMX router

As you might have seen from my previous post, I’m trying to get into Juniper configuration lately. One of the things that I needed is to set up a simple lab running Juniper vMX machines with multicast forwarding enabled.

It was a simple lab experiment with few commands on each device. As it turns out, being a Cisco fellow, each of those commands presented a complicated googling routine until the thing finally started to work.

Most time I spent configuring Virtual Machines and boot them properly, after that Juniper Configuration Guides were enough to make fist lab scenarios.

Googling went somewhat like this:

  • How to set up Juniper vMX on Vmware ESXi 6.0 and interconnect 8 instances of vMX?
  • How to configure Vmware network and vSwitches to make this work?
  • How to configure VCE and VPE vMX Control and Forwarding plane VM communication?
  • How to configure interfaces and map them to VMware vSwitch interfaces?
  • How to configure Juniper eth interfaces, OSPF, Multicast with PIM Sparse mode?
  • Why this does not work from the first try? Do I need vMX Evaluation licence to do that?
  • What for …. does ‘tunnel-services statement on one or more online FPC and PIC’ mean?

…so when it actually finally worked, I decided to share it so you can have one post that would describe it from start all the way to VLC Multicast streaming.

Cisco VIRL is finally out

Cisco virl logoCisco finally released long-awaited personal network simulator VIRL. VIRL is a simulator like Cisco CML – Cisco Modelling Lab released few moths ago which is made available for business network simulations and testing in engineering normal day job. With VIRL we got a personal version of CML with drastically lower price tag aimed to help students preparing for Cisco CCNP and more than that for those preparing CCIE lab exam. VIRL will surely help the engineers managing small business network to proof their configuration change before applying it to real network.

cisco_virl

This solution give us a more stable and “official” GNS3 which will save all the time spent troubleshooting lab issues that were really GNS3 issues.

CCIE RS v5 blueprint will be announced this month?

CCIE lab v5Please note that this article is more or less pure speculation. The fact is that CCIE R&S v5 blueprint will be presented 28th January 2014 on Milan’s Cisco live event everything else is yet to be announced.

From Milan’s Cisco live 28.1.2014 there is an CCIE R&S v5 blueprint event scheduled. When Cisco wants to speak about new CCIE lab blueprint on Cisco live it means that this blueprint will be announced prior to that event (couple of months before). That leads us to the conclusion that there will be new blueprint announcement this month. There is a big possibility that predictions about changes written in my article about CCIE v5 blueprint here should be changed for the lab exam somewhere around April 2014. Everything in details will be described on that event where Cisco will give out all the details of changes in new CCIE lab v5 blueprint.

There was a chance of announcement this summer when I was following Cisco Live in Orlando. After the event went through it was obvious that there was no mentions about the CCIE lab blueprint change. Later I was reading some blogs about Cisco’s way of changing the blueprint. From all of them it’s clear that new blueprint is never announced on some Cisco live event. It’s always discussed in detail in first event after the announcement. We have this situation now. There is a Cisco Live event in Milan, Italy in February and there is an CCIE v5 blueprint event scheduled for 28.2.2014. Based on all those information we are almost sure to see the announcement this month.

I am studying for the exam for 6 months now!?!

For us studying for the lab exam, the old topology and all the topics from v4 are still valid but for how long?

Cisco VIRL – Virtual Internet Routing Lab

Virtualisation

Cisco VIRL - Virtual Internet Routing Lab2In a world in which every day I hear virtualization at least 50 times it would be very strange that there is some part of our digital environment which is not yet virtualised. Today we can see that almost every piece of our server equipment is going to the cloud hence is being virtualised. That is not a new story, server virtualisation i basically existing for decades now. Todays story is about next step in the virtualization process. There is finally a big desire to do the same thing with networking equipment. That’s obviously the way to go as there are more and more server on one hypervisor or on one cluster in the data centers and that implies that would be too expensive to implement any kind of hardware networking devices for each virtual server instance. And that implies that we are living in a world where switches and routers are more and more becoming part of different virtualisation host kernels or hypervisors.

But now when that virtualization technology is basically a normal way of deploying almost all machines and there is nothing standing in between network devices virtualization and us why there is no way to use that technology and make for us a virtualized modeling tool for network design and troubleshooting to?

GNS3 vs VIRL

Yes, there is GNS3 for years now but to be sincere, I tried to use if for some design and troubleshooting sessions and it is so time-consuming to set everything to work right that is was at the end easier to do it on a piece of paper.