CCIE Journey: Getting EVE-NG setup.

all right hello and welcome back to my basement jeremiah wolfe here and i wanted to share with you guys uh my little bit of a journey over the past several days in getting even g set up um if you're going to be doing cisco studying especially for the ccie uh even g seems to be the way to go based on my research people might disagree now the the viral cisco viral which is now called uh cisco modeling labs personal edition um is also really good and probably good enough for a lot of things uh however even she lets you do some things that cisco modern labs does not let you do i i don't have a lot of experience with that stuff yet specifically we're talking about sd-wan and potentially sd access um but we're kind of getting into some gray areas of what's permitted and what's not and how this stuff works so i haven't gone down that road i am hoping desperately hoping that cisco provides some methodology of studying these advanced technologies that is not either obscenely expensive or you know but that is accessible and doable and it's legal i you know my goal is to get my ccie as of right now i there's no good way to study sd access and sd when as far as i know uh based purely on 100 legally licensed things so for now i am uh avoiding anything that's you know inappropriate or potentially illegal but it was one of those things where i was gonna be honest with you like i have a hard time really feeling bad about stuff like this because i'm simply it's not like i'm stealing their software to um you know sell it or to make money off it all i want to do is study i just want to study i want to learn cisco i want to learn your products so that i can support your products so that i can work for your vendors and help them to sell your products like this is all about helping to make you money and yet where we're at right now um we're kind of in this weird place where they don't they don't seem too interested in helping the technical people learn their products unless you want to send them to you know thousand multi-thousand dollar classes i i don't know so it's it's a frustrating spot you know i want to do things right i want to do things legal so for now that's all i'm doing and maybe in the future cisco will you know as i move into those more advanced things hopefully cisco will have something available and i won't have to you know bend the what's legal a little bit but um but if i have to you know like this is my family my livelihood um setting up a lab that hurts absolutely no one you're gonna have a hard time convincing me that that's wrong or something i don't know so that's where i'm at and maybe i shouldn't be admitting to that but um i haven't done anything wrong yet so you got nothing on me yet uh but yeah like you know who hasn't pirated a video or uh you know we all want to you know that's the thing it's like um back in the day you know you couldn't you couldn't listen to music you couldn't watch videos and there was all this rampant piracy and it's still you know still plenty of rampant piracy but you know when when netflix came out when all these services which let you just rent a video online for five or six bucks came out piracy just dropped off a cliff because people generally want to do it right we're more than happy to pay for something you know reasonable price that's going to give us some value i'm happy to pay for a tool that is going to help me to study as long as it's reasonably priced but when there's nothing available you know like what am i going to do so so that that's basically why i chose evg because i know that there are some options out there that are not available to me on other platforms if i ever need to use them so this uh this whole thing was a bit of a process holy crap now if you've been watching my stuff you know i i haven't been uh really in it in a long time and i haven't been i haven't touched a server in forever uh forever i don't even know so um yeah like it's i think the last time i set up a server from scratch was probably around two thousand and two 2002-ish 2004 was probably the latest i was doing any kind of real server stuff uh and as you might imagine things have changed a whole lot in the interim so this is a little bit of a challenge for me but here's my setup i got a dell r810 server that i got off of amazon i'll put a link down below it's not an affiliate link or anything like that it's just you know i've got a lot of people asking me so i'm gonna start trying to put it in and then a couple weeks ago or last week two week whatever i bought a couple switches off of ebay um a poe 2960 in a layer three 3750 just so i could uh do some stuff if i need i'm not actually sure i need both of those but they were so cheap i just i ended up getting them obviously right now i'm only using the one so this is uh this is what's connecting this into my home network and potentially you know if i get other equipment i can connect it here here's the server got it online poweredge r810 the only issue with the server is and i'm sure other people know how to do this i can't get the the console working from the the idrac um it gives me some kind of security here i looked it up i updated i did a bunch of stuff to try to get around it ultimately doesn't really matter i don't need to be on the server's console you know and if i need it as you can see i have a keyboard and monitor and whatnot so so that's not that honestly it's not that big of a deal i can just ssh into it if i need to um so so i want to share a little bit about how you know kind of what i had to go through to get this thing set up and the first thing to take a look at here is when setting up even g come over to the system requirements and um so what do we got here ubuntu uh 1604 and it's very this is interesting we'll get back to this um it says ubuntu 1819 are not supported uh alternatively we have esxi 6.0 or later vmware workstation 14 or or later those are the two that i care about um so let's take a look my initial intent was to use esxi because i i you know i don't know vmware at all i've never never touched it once in my life i've never been to their website once in my life until a week ago so so i'm like okay i'm doing some searching and i find out you can get a free esxi license sweet okay so and it works with 6.0 or later you know i started doing some digging i could go to the dell website i find the uh that's not true first i i got the esxi 7.0 or 7 whatever the current one is iso installed it on my server tried to install it on the server it couldn't see my hard drives obviously some kind of driver issue okay not sure what to do there i went to dell's website they had the latest that they had was a 6.0 um like uh version three i think it's called like a patch three or something um but that was the latest they had that was like pre-built with the with for the r810 so i installed that that worked fine and i was like okay well 6.0 is supported and so great so install it without a license i'm running on a uh you know temporary trial version basically and i go to get a license well i was able to get a license for version seven i go to install that license for version seven onto my 6.0 server and surprise surprise it doesn't work doesn't recognize the license so okay like i kind of expected that might happen i end up this took me like two days because i have no idea what i'm doing um but i ended up getting this upgraded to 6.7 so between dell's website and vmware's website i managed to find the tools and stuff to be able to actually upgrade it to 6.7 and then by doing some googling i found you can still get a 6.7 free license um i could not get it to the ver the server to version 7. i could not find anything with the proper drivers to get me to version seven and um while there is some some tools to like create your own custom uh install packages like it's just over my head and i just don't have the time to learn like you know that's just a whole other skill that i i don't have the time to learn right now so 6.7 was going to be my that's where i wanted to be fantastic i got it i got the free license i installed the free license it took it sweet well so then i go to set up my vm to install even g on and i'm kind of using the that's not it i'm using the instructions as laid out in the even g professional cookbook uh i think we're down here so follow the esxi instructions and i go through i set it up and it takes it everything's fine i go to start it it won't start and i'm like what the hell so i'm looking around and i'm looking at the errors and it turns out that i'm the problem i'm having with esxi is that i can't i don't have enough virtual cpus i had assigned my so my server has 40 cores so i was going to give the vast majority of those to the to the uh the vm for even g but it wouldn't start and you know when i was doing my initial research i saw this unlimited physical cpus unlimited cores per cpu i thought i was set what i didn't see was this here maximum of eight virtual cpus per vm so i can only assign eight total cores to the vm now here's the thing and maybe you're listening to me right now you're like dude you idiot no that's not what it means i couldn't get it to work i searched on google as best as i could and this is one of those things where i didn't find a lot of people talking about this problem but the vast vast majority of people that i found who had tutorials about setting up even g or who were talking about their own evg environments they were only using like this many uh cores they had these like really um anemic what i would consider to be anemic environments they're running on their laptop or just on a desktop um i couldn't really find anybody well that's not true i found some people who who did have tutorials for esxi but they obviously had a fully licensed version because they were not limited by this eight cpu so i don't know like maybe there's some kind of way to pirate esxi i didn't care to even look for it because you know whatever i'm not i'm not i'm not looking to steal something if i'm actually using it you know so i i you know it i didn't even look for like a pirated version of esxi because if i'm actually going to be using it and using it as an intended purpose like that just feels wrong to me so so i was like well so i was like okay well how about workstation because if we come back over sorry sorry do that to you if we come back over here we also have vmware workstation so okay so let's take about look at workstation and it's not too far off we have a limit of 16 cpus per vm now i have heard i saw something that on the vmware web page in like a blog posting that apparently there's a new version of workstation that actually supports 32 cpus per vm and out of my 40 cpu machine like that probably would have been adequate but on the official page for the current version that's available to download it says 16 so i said okay well crap so come back over here well it says something about ubuntu i'm like okay maybe i just do a bare metal install so i looked around and i i really had a hard time finding anybody talking about doing a bare middle install with even g but their cookbook does talk about it uh [Music] where's it at bear hardware server eve installation so that's what i tried i tried to install bare metal even slating using their image which is based on ubuntu or ubuntu however you say it sorry and uh it's interesting because if we go back so if we go back to the top it specifically says oh i'm sorry that was the wrong what was it page 36 if we come back over the system requirements it says ubuntu 18 and 19 are not supported however their even g image is built on 18 something so i'm not sure what's up with that however i quickly discovered that installing following the instructions in their cookbook um there it didn't like i had i had issues there seemed to be some kind of driver issue um it it skipped some of the steps that it showed i never got to like select my partition and stuff which was kind of weird and then because it lists it in the instructions that you're going to have to do that but i never came to that step and then when i finally got into the machine the um like the the network cards weren't visible and but they they showed up during install but then they weren't there when i booted into the actual uh uh ubuntu and like i said i'm not i'm not a linux guy i'm not a server guy and i was like goddammit i don't even know where to begin troubleshooting this and i want to get this thing up because oddly enough i want to get a couple vms of some linux machines so i can start learning linux so it's like i can't get the linux to learn linux until i troubleshoot the linux that's already there so it's kind of like what the fudge so i'm like geez oh pete so after doing a bunch more digging and thinking i came across this guy uh necron and i'll link his channel in the description or link this video anyway and in this video he goes through step by step how to do a bare metal install of even g on ubuntu 16 which is what even g says to use this is what they say to use and the other thing is ubuntu 16 4 actually is certified for the dell r810 it's one of their servers that they have certified so um so following his instructions i installed ubuntu 16 and then i downloaded the even g from that now when it came time to download even g is this it so he walked us through running this script which is available on the even g website so he just has to do a w get again i'm not a linux guy so i don't even know what wget is necessarily uh to run this script and the thing is when i ran it just kept giving me errors and it would error out and it didn't actually do the install so what i had to do was basically just take that script and strip out all the stuff that didn't make sense and just do it by hand so i just took the the script from the install script from the even g repo website and i just stripped out all the superfluous stuff and just ran it by hand and that worked fine that worked fine no errors no problems there was uh i think a couple of prompts that i got that he did not get in his youtube video so when he was doing his video and actually got to the the script part i got a question about the sequel password which he did not get so i i configured a sql password hopefully i haven't found any problems so hopefully eve uh wasn't kind of um you know uh hopefully when it did the install created its own user because i created a root password for sql and so hopefully it doesn't screw anything up okay so so that's that so let's take a look real quick at what we got so i just did a real quick setup just to kind of try it out and oh why am i do have the topology the one thing it's weird about like i try to keep one window open with so i can see the resources and another so i can see the topology but it it always closes it always goes it wants to go to the topology for some reason um i have to spend a lot more time with this even g cookbook i don't understand there's so many options and it's one of those things where like i i can kind of fudge my way through it but i suspect if i actually know what i'm doing it's probably going to go a lot better so um so yeah so but here we go i got a couple of routers set up sweet a couple of routers just to play around with and then like i said like i you know my next thing is i'm working on linux plus i need to learn linux so uh here we got mint what was the password for this and i set up an ubuntu server so uh servers running i haven't really done anything with that yet other than get the network configured and then um mint and just to show that i'm on the internet so it's pretty slick um so i'm looking forward to digging in to these things and i have access to i found some some pre-built uh linux uh machines for even g so there's several servers uh like full servers lightweight servers there's several uh versions of uh like end user like that mint and then there's some centos and so i don't i don't know what all the different distros are that are there and but i want to set up two or three just so i can go through and practice with the different commands i need to learn for the test so so that's it um it was a pain to get set up it's pretty cool now that i got it working i definitely had some minor issues like getting these when i was getting working on these um linux machines for some reason i couldn't get the network to connect i ultimately had to like disconnect them from the network and then reconnect them and then and start and stop the the vm for the machine and whatever it it eventually got got working i don't know why it didn't work and then evg has a built-in uh nat connection that just connects your lab to your physical nic to then get it out to the internet so so that was that was actually part was actually really easy so so far just you know playing around with it getting yourself got a long way to go to one learn the capabilities of even g and then obviously start building up complex labs but um that's a little bit down the road because next is back to work we're not back to work i'm really just basically getting started it's been two weeks since i i took that last cisco test and um i have been finding every excuse possible not to dig into linux plus i've read like 100 pages of the book it was just so boring and so just so i just got to sit down and make note cards and start studying in a just brute force memorization of all these commands that i'm not really looking forward to so i've been kind of putting it off and using getting this lab set up which i do need i do need for my studying but i've been kind of using it as a little bit of an example excuse not to study as much as i should have so all right that's my experience with getting even g set up obviously i'm not going in all the technical stuff but i'm going to link that guy's video it was incredibly helpful and you know i don't know maybe maybe you're watching this and you're like dude you had all these problems because you did it all wrong and that's entirely possible but you know what it's working right now so we're just going to stick with what i got all right hey this is jeremiah take it easy peace

Channel: Jeremiah Wolfe

Views: 6,014

Keywords: EVE-NG, CCIE, Cisco Certification

Id: 1qlg-owgvUs

Length: 22min 46sec (1366 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 28 2020