Configuring GNS3 and GNS3 VM for Cisco IOSv

hello out there in the networking world to all my friends and colleagues I've decided to go ahead and make an attempt here to record a video an instructional video if you will on installing and configuring gns3 to support cisco iOS v this is very similar to what you might see if you are running say cisco viral there are certainly many different tutorials out there that discuss this topic and often times when i'm teaching my ccnp classes or my advanced routing and switching classes or even my CCIE mentorship program i use this program gns3 for pretty much all of our all of our lab exercises and all of our practical exposure to the configuration elements of those extras of those those courses and certainly there's lots of tools that are available I would definitely take a look at things like eave ng or Cisco viral VI RL but gns3 has been always been kind of a staple if you will a package that we use so I'll try to make this as brief as possible but I want to kind of just run through the process now with regard to the operating system that I'm running and the platform that I'm running because this will of course vary depending on what type of platform you're running I am running a a Windows 10 platform here with kind of a basic set up 32 gigs of memory 64-bit operating system and I'm running intel core i7 processor running at 3.3 gigahertz with Windows 10 Pro so while most of these steps that I'm going to be going through should apply to what you're doing in your environment as well just make note that obviously it's going to be different depending on your specific environment so I'm going to walk through the steps of essentially configuring gns3 to work with Cisco IOS v so that you can install things like virtual appliances a sa vs 1000 V's nexus virtual routers and switches and other virtual routers as well I'm also going to make a note of how to install just a generic iOS platform as well because some of the topologies that we deal with don't work necessarily with iOS V for example iOS v doesn't support serial interfaces and so sometimes we may want to use a basic platform that's going to provide us the ability to connect serial interfaces to our environment now I've gone through and I've uninstalled gns3 on my platform here so I just go to gns3 net or gns3 net or gns3 comm and I go to the download section presently they're running two to eight I haven't really found too many differences between that I use anyway from version 2.2 point o up to two point two point eight certainly there are probably some significant differences but what you'll do is you'll download of course this version of software I've already actually downloaded it and let me go into my folder here and I'm going to go through the installation process of two to eight to start with if you take a look in if you're watching this video I'm going to post in the comment section instructions on how to get access to all of these files that I'm going to be using in this video here so I double click this installation package and I'm gonna go ahead and install it anyway now most of the settings I've found here are going to be pretty standard right with regard to the options that I select and so on so I'm just gonna go ahead and agree to the installation it's gonna use the standard menu folder and I'm just going to install the gns3 desktop application we're actually going to install the VM separately because I want to show you a couple of settings that I like to prepare a couple of things that I like to do before prior to getting into setting up the gns3 VM we'll talk about that a little bit now I'm going to go through the this process of installing and setting up the VM as well which is required by the way to run gns3 for iOS v in this particular case so i'm going to use the regular install directory directory and we're going to go through the installation process so I'm just going to pause the video here until we get to the point where we need to make some additional selections and then we'll continue on so the installation has completed I'm going to go ahead and click Next here now a SolarWinds standard toolset I haven't really found personally any use for this I'm not suggesting there isn't but I don't typically use this tool set in in what I'm doing with gns3 even if I'm using wireshark for example to do Wireshark captures so I typically will say no here to install this tool set I'm also going to uncheck this box to start gns3 because there's a few other settings that I want to go through before I actually go through and setup gns3 or actually get into the point where I'm starting gns3 and so on all right so I've gone through the installation process I didn't skip anything basically I just installed gns3 with its default settings alright now I have found from time to time there is a packet capture application that's integrated with gns3 called Wireshark and it requires a back-end tool to allow that capture to take place and I have found them with Windows 10 in some cases you might have to download a secondary capture application and not install the default win peek app that comes with gns3 I did find though with later versions of gns3 that this has been ruse so it shouldn't be an issue with two to eight I believe I kind of got past this issue when I installed the stuff versions above two to zero so the next step in the process of configuring your desktop to work with iOS v is that you're going to need to install some sort of virtual machine software now I choose to use VMware Workstation I have happened to run fifteen dot X I've put in the software folder VMware version workstation version 14 point 1.2 which you can certainly use but again you'll need to install VMware Workstation now one of the things that I do is there there's a setting that needs to be set up or a configuration that needs to be set up in VMware Workstation before you can actually go through and install the virtual machine or I would recommend any way that you do before you go through and install the virtual machine so once you have VMware Workstation installed and working and again you can use VirtualBox or maybe VMware Player I'm using workstation pro but if you want to use the player version you certainly can and the steps might be slightly different in setting up the virtual missour environment but what you want to do is you want to go to edit and you want to go to your virtual network editor alright now this will load essentially what you have with regard to different adapters and so on I'm going to go ahead and delete the existing adapter that I have and I'm gonna add go ahead and add it back after after we go through the process I'm gonna remove that network actually I'm gonna add it back so you can see what that process looks like okay so typically this is what your virtual machine environment would look like just kind of after you've installed everything you don't have any networks added to the VMware Workstation environment now what you want to do is you want to click you can click add Network here if you'd like but I found that in order to kind of administer the settings and to set up things for your particular environment that you want to go ahead and operate this as in a privileged mode so I always click that and then it gives me additional options here I'm going to add a network and you can select essentially any one of these that you want these are arbitrary values that you can choose I'm going to go ahead and just choose VM net one in this particular case and I don't actually abridge gns3 for the for my purpose I don't bridge gns3 to my physical interface or to my public publicly routed space if you will Oh or at least my tcp/ip routed space so I actually just run this in host only mode which works very well for what I'm trying to do you may decide to do it in bridged mode or NAT mode play around with the settings a little bit typically you would only do that if you're trying to connect to say for example other machines in your environment through a bridged connection in gns3 it's kind of more of an advanced topic that we're not going to get into in this particular case so I'm gonna run this in host only mode and then you want to select a subnet for this adapter this is very important because this is how you're going to set up the gns3 VM to communicate with your gns3 environment so it'll pick a number for you kind of an arbitrary number it doesn't really matter what the class of the address space is or what the actual octets are I always kind of just pick one that I don't suspect will cause any conflicts later on down the road and that's it I pretty much leave all of the other settings to the same value you can certainly change the DHCP scope and and modify those settings but I pretty much leave those the same and I'll just simply click apply and that will create that virtual machine adapter for me which I'm going to be using to tie into my gns3 VM alright now once that's done once that's done provisioning now I'll be in a position to install the gns3 VM in my environment now you can get this gns3 VM directly from the the same place you downloaded gns3 you'll notice right here for optimal performance please download the VM for gns3 and they have it for VirtualBox like I said VMware Workstation infusion VMware exs I and Microsoft hyper-v now I've already downloaded it for VMware Workstation so I'm just going to go here and go back to my gns3 folder it's very important that you use the VM version for the gns3 version that you're installing they're not backwards compatible and they're not cross compatible with different versions so whenever you're downloading or upgrading gns3 make sure you're always selecting the appropriate gns3 vm based on what you've actually installed now I'm simply going to double click this virtual machine once I've already have VMware Workstation installed it's gonna basically say ok I'm gonna use this template to deploy this virtual machine in your particular environment I'm gonna leave that as the name but I'm gonna choose to install this in a alternate directory just because I have a folder in my computer here if I can find it I have a folder in my computer where I keep all of my virtual machines alright and I'm just gonna say gns3 we'll use this same name here vm 2 point 2 point 8 all right so that's where we're going to install this in that full make sure that it's of course mapped correctly and I'm just gonna simply click import and what it's doing is it's basically building the virtual machine that's necessary for running all of your iOS v elements in gns3 alright once this is imported I'm gonna go ahead and make sure that there are a couple of different settings that are set up in the gns3 VM and then I will be able to go into gns3 and start to integrate this VM into gns3 so I'm gonna go to edit the virtual machine before I power it on and there's a couple of things that I like to change here I have lots of memory in my computer I recommend running the VM with a minimum of 4 gigs i I run mine with 8 gigs just because I have some extra memory on my computer but I've found that in most cases four gigs of memory is sufficient to run multiple nodes within the gns3 environment same thing with the processors I have quite a few processors so I'm going to go ahead and dedicate two processors and two cores but this is a very important piece right here this virtualization engine you need to make sure that this virtual eyes Intel VT is checked in order for gns3 to work correctly with your computer now this may require that you actually boot up in BIOS let me see if I can find an image of this and of course it's gonna be different for each platform so what I've done is I've kind of just done a Google search enabling virtual machine in BIOS of course you probably want to search on something more specific to your particular platform but if you look at all of these different screenshots these are all BIOS settings for different platforms and in many cases you're going to see something that says virtualization technology that needs to be enabled in your system BIOS and and again it'll show up in in lots of different places here's an example Intel virtualization technology here Intel virtualization technology is disabled that is going to prevent gns3 from running correctly so this is a setting that you would definitely have to change again this is a PC environment so it might be different for a Mac environment or a Linux of course a Linux environment would probably be much simpler but I'm running Windows in this particular case so I want to make sure that I've allocated enough memory for gns3 to run effectively I typically run anywhere from 5 nodes up to 15 nodes in my environment so I like to have lots and lots of memory and then on the network adapter side I want to go ahead and make sure that I select that specific adapter that I set up in my hypervisor application what whichever one you're using in this particular case I'm using a VMware Workstation 15 all right so I'm gonna hit OK we're gonna apply these settings and at this point the gns3 VM is essentially installed and configured so I'm gonna go ahead and power on this virtual machine there isn't a whole lot you have to do here you know with regard to troubleshooting as long as that virtualization technology is enabled and and you have that virtualization checkbox in the in the gns3 vm setup you should be fine most importantly there's two things that you should see here virtualization should be indicated you shouldn't see a none there and you should also see an IP address based on what you configured now you could use this to this VM to run Cisco IO you as well that you would require them to install a license the iou license and so on I actually have a PDF in my in the folder that I'm gonna post a link to in the comments section where you can actually get that those steps as well and a PDF all right so now the VM is running I'm just going to go ahead and minimize that and we're basically ready to go so I'm gonna start my gns3 application and I'm going to start to configure the settings now prior to doing this one of the other things that I typically would do is I would go into my firewall application whichever one it is and I would make sure that in in the firewall that I'm allowing a couple of things to go through my firewall application one of them is going to be Dynamix Dynamix is a process that gns3 uses for the emulation and I'm just going to go ahead and make sure change the settings here I'm gonna make sure that dynamap is allowed through the firewall and then in addition I'm going to make sure that all of my gns3 related applications are allowed through the firewall as well and again this is Windows Firewall it really depends on your specific computer setup as to whether or not you would have a third-party firewall application that you have to allow or you know some other firewall software right whether it's Mac OS based firewall software or Linux or Windows so when you open up gns3 the first thing you're going to see is you're going to see the ability to add additional appliances I'm going to hit cancel here because I want to go through and set up some of the settings we can see that in the server list here my PC is listed as an available resource this is used to run kind of native devices within gns3 iOS devices as well as the built-in devices in the device list and Ethernet switch and Ethernet hub and so on alright so what I need to do now is I need to make sure that gns3 is configured to work with my virtual machine as well so I'm going to go to edit and I'm going to go to preferences and I'm going to click on the server tab and I'm gonna make sure that in the host binding section here that I select the interface that is essentially the gateway address of that VMware host adapter that I created for my gns3 VM you might change the port number if you want I really haven't seen too many areas where this port number would have to be changed but so I typically leave this at 30 80 but it's it doesn't really matter what you put this at because it's local to your computer it's just the port that you're going to use to establish a connection to the gns3 VM which by the way doesn't have to be configured on the gns3 VM at all so I'm going to go ahead and apply those settings it's going to try to connect to the gns3 VM but I haven't set up those settings yet all right so we'll go ahead and apply those settings and then there's one other step we have to perform before we can get this to work completely notice we got some errors here it's connecting to the localhost but it's the the gns3 server connection is failing in this particular case all right that's because I need to go to gns3 VM and I need to enable the gns3 VM here and I need to select the VM that I installed I have lots of them on here but and it's kind of a pain sometimes this thing pops out but if you can make sure that you get the appropriate gns3 vm selected again make sure that you kind of allocate the appropriate amount of resources here 8192 is what I selected and two virtual CPUs this does not have to match and you can play around with these settings and find out what's kind of optimal for your environment leave them at default initially if you'd like the other thing that I do is I keep I check this radio button this is important because when you close out oftentimes you might have to reboot gns3 because the application hangs or something like that and you don't necessarily want to have the VM shutdown and come back up each time so by checking this radio button I'm in essence just saying hey just leave that VM even if I close out gns3 because I might just be restarting gns3 so now when I hit apply what should happen in this case is after I get out of the gns3 configuration I should see both of my servers listed here and it will depend on a couple of different things it will depend on how your firewall is set up it'll depend on whether or not you have maybe some other conflicts on your computer as to whether or not these servers will show up so oftentimes what I'll do is I'll just quit gns3 and I'll make sure that my VM is still running and then I'm just gonna go back into gns3 and hopefully after all the settings have been applied give it a couple of minutes sometimes it takes a little bit for these to pop up but I should see two different servers in my server summary list and both of those servers should have a green node next to them right so you can see G&S 3 vm 2 to 8 is not green my local local host server is green so I'm just gonna give it a minute notice now this has turned green now if you've gotten to that point you should be good to go everything should be working just fine so now the only thing left is to actually kind of tune the settings and perhaps install some different appliances and so on and that's what we're gonna do in this particular case all right I am going to now add an iOS V router and I'm going to add an iOS V switch and I'm also going to add a traditional iOS based which as well because I do like to use those if I'm doing ios-based router excuse me I do like to use those if I am if I'm doing you know connection or builds that require a serial interface or something like that actually there is one other setting I'm gonna set first the built-in console application is solar putty I prefer to use super putty because it provides me tab based access and some other features so you can go out to Google and search on super putty it's also in the the folder the software folder that I provided a link to but I'm going to set this up to work with super putty so I already have the application installed I'm just going to go ahead and put in manually the location x86 and it is super putty and the executable is super putty dot exe and again these steps are in a PDF in the comments section below there's a link to download the the PDF that has screenshots of this as well alright so I'm going to use telnet as my application % H I don't need to talk about these switches and what they represent if you do set this up and you install super putty with its basic settings there's one other thing you have to do in super putty I'll make sure that we go through and show you that to make sure a super putty will work percent P a dash WT and % D and let's do a double quote at the end alright again this is specific to my computer where the program is installed and so on but I like to use this application alright I'll show you actually one of the other important settings that you're going to have with super putty it's very important actually when you go to the putty of the options here you need to make sure that the executable that you're using with super putty is the one that's installed in the gns3 folder super putty when it gets installed by D fault uses its own putty executable the switches and the arguments that we use or the the the options that we use for the console application command will not work with the jet the supercut or the super putty referenced putty executable so make sure that you change this putty Exe location to one to the one that came with gns3 or that gets installed with gns3 by default all right so now we are on our really kind of our final step here which is to go ahead and add a couple of our appliances all right so I'm gonna go ahead and add an appliance if you click this icon right here basically browse all devices icon and you click new template the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to add an iOS v router all right so install an appliance from the gns3 server we're going to select a router now you can see we have lots of lots of choices here and and certainly because we're now running this in a virtual machine environment we can install things like let's see a 1000 V or a Cisco IOS xrv or an XR v 9000 I'm just going to use the generic iOS V platform because that's the software that I have many of these different choices these different Hardware choices people have posted the appropriate files in online that you can download so we're going to go ahead and hit install we're going to install the appliance on the gns3 vm we're gonna leave these settings as default now you'll notice that I have actually already one that's ready to be installed this 15.6 1t in the comments section I posted a link to this folder in the iOS V folder I have the three files that I'm using to install the router and the switch I found that these platforms work very well for just about any lab build that I do for my classes and for my own experimentation certainly you could use different versions if you go back to gns3 there may be a reason to run 15-7 3m3 I haven't found one but personally but certainly if you can get those files from somewhere online you can certainly install that appliance I use the 1561 t1 it works pretty well so what you want to do is you want to highlight the because yours will say missing missing missing when you do this install initially you want to make sure that you highlight 1561 t in our particular case go to the vos V iOS Enterprise k9 option and click import and then you're going to browse to wherever you stored those files in our case it's in the software folder gns3 software iOS v and I'm simply going to select that the appropriate file there alright so that's this file right here which I already have installed and then once it uploads that file you're going to click the import option right excuse me the we already did that you're going to import the startup config as well so we go back here and there's the iOS V start up - config or startup underscore config you can modify this file if you want again the defaults are pretty pretty straightforward here's an important thing once both of these are green found on gns3 vm would would not be what it should say it should already say ready to install but once it says ready to install you highlight the appliance and then you click Next and it's gonna say would you like to install this appliance I'm gonna say yes and I'm gonna say finish alright and you'll notice now that we have the appliance stood in our all devices list this 1561 tu can rename that by the way I like to leave it that because it tells me what iOS version I'm running there all right now you can actually configure the template here this is really useful because you'll notice here on the network side you can add additional adapters if you want to have I think it's up to this well maybe more than 16 everything I do is pretty much with four four adapters you can specify the the format you can specify the base MAC address of the device you can play around with the different interface types I've played around with it a little bit I found that Intel gigabit is the one that works in this particular case and there are some other settings that you can set here I don't really modify any of these settings for what I'm doing in my environment alright default name format you could modify what is the the standard symbol and so on how much memory most of the time I just leave these values at their default unless I come up with a specific use case scenario that requires me to modify those particular settings alright so now we're gonna add our switch appliance I'm gonna click on the all devices category click on new template again install from a gns3 server and we're gonna go to switches and I'm gonna go ahead and install an iOS vl2 device and again this is kind of generic but you can see we have some Nexus options here we have some juniper switches as well as long as you have the appropriate software you can install those appliances as well alright so we're gonna go ahead and click install click Next Next here and again I've already got this one installed but again you would go to import find the local file once it said ready to install then you click Next and it will install that particular appliance alright it's waiting for the appliances the files to be uploaded all right now this name I don't really care for so I typically will come here and and just get rid of all of this stuff here because all I care about is the the software version in addition on this one I usually try to change the the number of adapters to four or maybe six because if I'm doing something like spanning-tree or if I'm doing you know some other stuff with the switches I don't like to see you know a whole bunch of different ports because I typically don't need that many ports in my configuration so you can modify this as you add an appliance as well it doesn't this is just what the default would be in this particular case a lot of times I'll change the base MAC address of the appliance to to simulate specific topologies and environments and so on so I've added my to iOS V devices the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add an a standard iOS device I like to have a standard iOS device because again there are some limitations to iOS v that a standard iOS device does not provide or does not have so I'm going to do a manual template and I'm gonna go to iOS routers I'm gonna create a new iOS router now you could run this in your VM or you could run it from your local host I don't know that there's really much of a difference from a performance standpoint I usually run my standard iOS devices from my local host to kind of share that that resource and then I'm gonna browse to an image whether it's a new image or an existing image all right I'm gonna browse to an image that I have on my platform now here's an important thing depending on what platform you're using I I kind of use a standard image in my case I love this 7,200 image it works very well certainly the the 1,000 the image works are the 1,000 works well there are some other plat I like this advanced enterprise k9 image the 15 to 4s7 image because it does support quite a bit I you know with regard to a lot of the features that most of my classes require so I'm going to select this dot image and it's going to allow me to install that image now I already have it installed in my case right and you might actually be in selecting a dot bin or whatever but I already have this image installed so it is this one right here so I'm going to go ahead and install that image now here's the thing I've run into a situation where gns3 will ask you if you want to extract the dot bin to a dot image and I've run into situations where the terminal application doesn't work on certain computers if you extract the image for as a dot bin to a dot image so you can leave it as a dot bin if you're running into a situation where for some reason the terminal application isn't responding in other words you you put an appliance in your environment and then you'd write you know right-click it and go to click the console and the console window comes up but nothing happens right just kind of a little crazy workaround I found is that if you install the binary file and do not extract it as a dot image that that fixes that particular problem I haven't had that problem on my computer so I will extract it as a dot image this is a 70-200 I'm gonna leave the standard mega bits or the memory and I like to use a four port Ethernet card and a four port serial interface card this is the one that's critical here right because a lot of topologies that you have to build require the use of a serial interface so that is something that I like to install of course you can add other adapters here you can do an eight port Ethernet adapter you can do a Gigabit Ethernet adapter fast ethernet and so but I think the for port Ethernet adapters work just fine and you're gonna find that with most of the builds that Cisco uses for their classes they use standard Ethernet ports as opposed to Fast Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet all right so we're gonna click Next now the idle PC is is a very useful element as well notice it says here an idle PC value is necessary to prevent the iOS to use a hundred percent of your processor so I'm gonna click this button it might take a couple of minutes and it's gonna go look for an idle PC value now if you doesn't find one here don't panic I'm not sure the internal process that's going on for it to be able to identify a particular value but it does take a few minutes will let it go through the process if it finds a value go ahead and use that value whatever that value might be if it doesn't find a value that's okay you can finish the installation even if you doesn't find a particular value there all right so it found a value for me that's suitable I'm gonna go ahead and use that value and I'm just gonna click finish all right so now we have all three of the basic appliances that I use for most of my builds and now I can start building a topology right so I can drop in my router here I can come in here and change the symbol if I want I haven't a preference with these affinity square red symbols here but it's up to you what the what symbols you'd like to use they've got all kinds of different icons here that you can use you could change that to be the default behavior as well you can move around the name and remember I said you can also configure the number of interfaces here these are this is the base MAC address this is really useful if you're doing things like a switch with spanning tree that can be really really useful when you're trying to establish what the base MAC address is of the device because that will affect your spanning tree election process and so on and I can bring in a switch as well I can come in here and change the symbol for my switch and you can change this one to the switch icon if you want again this is mostly superficial right it doesn't really matter what the icon is but it's kind of arbitrary but I kind of have a you know I like to use these these symbols here notice the devices haven't started yet right and this is the console information I can use my connector tool I can also come in here and drop in a standard iOS device if I want again changing this symbol to be whatever you know I want it to be in this case a router alright and then I can start to connect these devices together so I can take my gig interfaces on my iOS V platform and connect in to my gig interface on my switch I can take my Ethernet and fast ethernet interfaces and connect them to my switch I notice here that I also have some serial interfaces available as well to do serial connections and then I can basically just start my appliances here it takes a little bit of time for them to boot up but once I have Bou tadaima PI can start you know build my topology move them around and so on and then I can console into these devices which launches my putty application all right now if you don't like the default font or the colors or whatnot here you can go to tools and you can go to putty configuration and you can change that appearance I'm going to just change the font size once you made all the changes the colors and everything that you want to change if you wanted to to save that for future connections make sure you go to your your connection tab and in this case we're using our session tab excuse me we're using our default settings I'm gonna go ahead and save that highlight default settings and click Save so the next time I open up another window let me go ahead and close this out the next time I open up another window in fact let me rename this device as well I'm going to just call this r2 and I'm gonna call this a a SW one change hostname a SW one oops wrong box let's do a SW one there our a SW two and we'll just change the host name of this guy back to r2 all right when I right click and I go to the console you'll notice that because of the switches I used in my super putty application that it actually puts the name of the device here I made a typo so it's adding an extra backslash there so I'm going to fix that but and now I have access to my device and you can open them all up at once if you want or you can open them up individually but the nice thing is it provides these tabs to allow you to open up each of those devices and you can use your scripting tool to send commands to each of the devices and so on that's why I like this particular application I've got an extra backslash in my syntax there when I set that up but and you can open up your multiple devices and you can tab through them and so on one of the things that I do is super putty as well is because it's annoying you'll notice here that it doesn't let me drag the tabs down I can move them across the top here if I want them in a particular order that is a setting under options to restrict floating windows I always check that because it's really annoying sometimes I'll be working in super putty and I'll click a tab and then it'll think I'm trying to drag that that tab out and move it somewhere else so I like to set that up let me see where I have my extra backslash here under my console let's see that looks correct I'll have to figure out why it's adding that additional backslash in there because those are the right switches backslash % d backslash I know why because I forgot to add there should be a quote right here in front of the % D alright again it's in the PDF that I provided so now if I go in console here I should just see yeah router - perfect all right now there is one other thing I'm gonna mention before I close up this this video when you go into the device you're gonna notice for your interfaces here in iOS V on routers the interfaces are always disabled by default that's my me C which that's my iOS platform my iOS V platform show IP interface brief the gig interfaces are going to be disabled by default that's going to be the same with your iOS platform but my point is if you build a topology where you're configuring interfaces and you're setting up those interfaces you're putting IP addresses and making them active and so on with a no shutdown command even though you saved your configuration and everything in the configuration will save iOS v routers the interfaces are always shut down when you start them up the first time these it'll still maintain the rest of your configuration but you have to go in in and make sure that you turn on your interfaces as part of that process with standard iOS you don't have to do that if you go into the configuration and you do a no shut as part of your standard configuration those interfaces will be active when you when you load up your project file and you go into those devices on switches it doesn't matter switches for example in iOS v all the interfaces are enabled by default so we don't have to turn on those interfaces as long as something is physically connected the interfaces are going to come up automatically alright so obviously there's a lot more that we could discuss with regard to tuning gns3 and setting it up I guess there is one other thing that I would like to mention with regard to saving your projects oftentimes when I save a project well whenever you create a project let me show you real quick if I go to my Program Files directory on my C Drive here Program Files gns3 in this gns3 folder you're going to see all of your files and one of the things in that folder is if I can find it actually it's probably going to be under users let's do that C colon users and Scott and if I go to G and s3 here and I go to projects you can see all the projects that I've been working on and you'll notice when a project gets created it actually creates a whole bunch of different project files there's literally hundreds of files that get created with a particular project these are certainly necessary if you're building the project and you're working with it but I don't like to have all these files on my computer so once I've gone through and I've and I've completed a project I will go ahead and delete that project from from my computer but before I do that what I like to do is I like to go into gns3 and I like to export the project as a portable project so I just checked the boxes include the base image in the snapshots and then I browse to wherever I want to save that file now the nice thing about this let me go show you some that I've already saved for my CCMP encore class let's see Enterprise Core encore books and labs discovery labs these are the files that I saved for each of the labs let me do a list view here and you notice it's a single file right now the files are not very large it makes them very portable they're only about thirty five Meg's each it depends on the topology but the wonderful thing about this is that when I want to use this project I can go back into gns3 and I can just simply say import a project go to that directory where I save that project file that that that single file and I can just basically import that individual project file all right then it's course skins can try and create a project for me which is fine you can let that happen and that's going to go into that users directory when so now it's creating kind of all of those sub directories in those files which I will then go back and later delete because I don't want that stuff stored on my computer I just I want to keep that single project file that I can import and then I can you know build my topology and go through and do my configurations just makes it a little bit cleaner when you're dealing with all of the the files and whatnot that are created in gns3 so I've got my project here that I created notice it's nice and clean it's got all the devices and I can then start up my devices and I can highlight all of them if I choose and click this little icon here and it will open up all of those devices in my super putty each tab for each of the devices and then I can kind of go through here and start to do my different configurations all right depending on your how much how much resources you allocated towards the devices themselves will depend on how quickly they boot up and how you know how quickly you can get access to them I have found with iOS V that it does take a little bit more time that's another thing too if you're running dot bin as opposed to dot image in other words you're not extracting the dot bin file it seems to run a lot faster with iOS v as well I have enough resources on my computer that I don't typically have to worry about it alright so I'm running in this particular case I am running for this build my 7200 image so again if I if I do a show IP interface brief you can see the interfaces that I've configured where are up up if this was I Oh s V I would have to go and enable those router interfaces before my project could start working which is a little bit of a pain but you can do that with the script tool here pick the devices that you want to modify you can highlight individual devices and then you can go in here and type in the script that you want to push to those devices config T interface gig zero zero no shut it cetera okay so hopefully you found this lesson to be informative like I said I'm gonna post in the comment section how you can get access to everything you need to be able to do exactly what we did in this particular lesson alright so post a comment reach out to us if you have any questions and good luck in getting everything set up and we'll see you in our next tutorial

Channel: thinQtank Learning

Views: 2,324

Keywords: #thinQtank Learning, #thinQtank, #GNS3, #Cisco IOSv, #Cisco Certification, #Network Simulation, #CONCESSION

Id: G-QkGyNGc68

Length: 53min 6sec (3186 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2020