Getting Started with Cisco's CSR 1000v Router

hey everybody this is Kevin Wallace cc CA and Cisco press author and in this video I want to get you started working with the Cisco csr the cloud services router 1000 V and the V reminds us that it's a virtual router I've been working with this a lot lately because the CSR 1000 v that's what's on the new CCI collaboration lab version 2.0 and as I've been working with this it occurred to me that you know what this will be a fantastic solution for somebody wanting to lap up some route scenarios you're working with rip in G perhaps or OSPF or ERP or BGP you want to play with route redistribution maybe you want to set up a Cisco IOS firewall you can do all those sorts of things on a CSR 1000v and and you can do it for free assuming that you've got the hardware to run ESXi on so that's what we're gonna do in this video now here's the disclaimer I realize that the CSR 1000v is capable of a lot more then we're gonna see in this video you can do all sorts of cool little tweaks and you can set up trunks and you can set up these console connections by doing some firewall manipulation I just want to get you started our goal for this video is to set up a three router lab that you could use to do just about any route scenario that you would want to so let's go out to the live interface right now and take a look at some characteristics of the csr 1000v Cisco's cloud services router as we mentioned is a virtual router which means that we can run it in a virtual machine along with lots of other routers on that same underlying hardware or we could host it out in a cloud provider for example I'm gonna be demonstrating this on VMware ESXi specifically I'm going to be using version 6.7 but you could run it on Microsoft hyper-v you could run it in the cloud on AWS and this is just a sampling there are other platforms as well that are supported you can check the documentation at at Cisco's website for all of the platforms but these are some of the big players that we think about and it's going to be running Cisco IOS X II and the great news is this is very similar to regular Cisco IOS that you would have on something like a nice our second-generation router that means that if you're studying for your CCNA and routing and switching or maybe your route exam or your doing some t shoot troubleshooting exercises this could be a fantastic solution for you I mentioned a few moments ago that I started working with the CSR 1000 B because that's what Cisco is using on their new CCA collaboration lab version 2.0 over the lab and I think this is great for home lab use not just for collaboration but also for like I said routes which your route exam may be T shoot and to get started we need to go out and download the software and the software that you're going to be able to download is gonna vary based on what your level of permission is associated with your cisco CCO account now i used to be associated with a cisco learning partners account which meant i could go out and download just about anything I wanted however now since I have my own company I'm a little bit more limited on what I can download so I'm not able to go out and download for free the 16.3 version of csr 1000v however cisco does make available and I think this is available to anybody that has a free CCO account they make available version 13 dot 11 to sed and that's still running some version of iOS 15 so it's not like it's outdated by a whole lot but if you don't have a smart net maintenance contract this might be the only one that you can download for free but you can go out and see what you're able to download and just to make it easy to find this page I've created a short bitly link you can go to BI te ly / a CSR 1000 V and when you get there you're going to be presented with the page like you see here on screen and you're asked do you want to download the OVA file the bin or the ISO file and normally I would pick the OVA file because that has all the information that something like ESXi needs to create the virtual machine it knows how much hard drive space and how much ram and in those that network interface cards but I had an issue when trying to load this on version 6.7 of ESXi now earlier I tried to load it on I think it was ESXi 5.5 and the OVA worked fine so it just depends on what version of ESXi you're running you might be fine with the OVA but if it doesn't work I want to show you in this video how to use the ISO file now I'm downloaded that ISO filed on a hard drive so you just go out and login with your Cisco account you that link select the ISO image if you want to follow along with this video and we'll hop out in just a moment to the ESXi interface and I'll show you how we upload that iso file from the hard drive and then how we build a sample topology now by the way this video is assuming that you already have or know how to setup ESXi and if you don't if you don't have ESXi installed already or you're not familiar with it i'm gonna be doing another video coming up in a bit that's gonna show you how to install ESXi because it's needed not just for csr 1000v it's needed for lots of virtual things that cisco has for example i'm going to be working with the twelve dot / zh another and a lot of the other servers that cisco has and those are gonna be running on my vmware esxi machines so i'll do another video showing how to get that set up but this is assuming that we've already got ESXi setup here's the topology we want to build and again this is targeting somebody that wants to practice with routing the technologies writing protocols route redistribution maybe different areas within OSPF route filtering I want to show you how to set up three routers r1 r2 and r3 now ESXi comes with one virtual switch it's called V switches zero and this is connected to an external interface which connects out to my lab network and it has an address space of one ninety two dot one sixty eight dot one dot 0 slash 24 I'm gonna give in that final octet or one a value of 15 so that's gonna point out to my lab network but then notice that r1 needs to connect to r2 so I want to create a virtual switch I'll call it s w1 v that sits between r1 and r2 I'll create another virtual switch SW to V that sits between r2 and r3 and I'll create a third virtual switch SW 3 V that hangs off of r3 now please keep in mind I wouldn't have to create all these virtual switches I could just create multiple port groups on the V switches 0 much like you would create different VLANs on a Cisco Catalyst switch and I could connect everything there but I thought and I went back and forth on this a little bit but I thought it's going to be easier to visualize if we use a topology like this because we can visualize a router connecting to a switch connecting to a router to a switch and so on so this is the topology that I want to build for you now let's get started by going out to the ESA sigh interface here we are inside of the ESXi web interface and in previous versions of ESXi you might have had to download a utility that runs on Microsoft Windows that gets you this kind of interface but here I'm running version 6.7 I can access it over the web and this is a fresh install I don't have any virtual machines created I don't have any additional virtual switches or port groups created we just want to start from scratch now the first thing I want to do is I want to upload that ISO file that I've already downloaded from Cisco to do that I go into data store 1 and I want to go to the data store browser let's find that file I'll do an upload and here it is CSR 1000v let's open that up and it's going to upload that to my data store and then I'll point to this ISO image as I'm installing my three virtual machines which are going to be my three virtual routers give it just a few more seconds to finish the upload well it looks like we're uploaded there's our file we'll come back to that later let's close out of that and the first thing I want to do is to create our three virtual switches so let's go to networking virtual switches and you can see the one that we get by default to be switched 0 but I'm gonna say add a standard virtual switch I'll make this font a bit bigger so it'll be easier to see let's add a standard virtual switch I'm gonna call this one s w1 v to remind me it's a virtual switch and the VM NIC 0 is already in use by V switch 0 and my server has three other NICs in it I'm not going to use those Nick's so it doesn't really matter what I choose here I'll just leave it it VM NIC one which is in the down state because I don't have anything connected but I have to select something and I'll say add so I've created another switch let's create another switch SW 2 v SW 2 V we'll add that and one other switch will say this is SW 3 V and we'll add that now what we want to do is to create a port group which is going to represent the ports on these different switches I'll create PG 1 port Group 1 in other words for switch s w1 v I'll Creek PG 2 port group - for our second switch in PG 3 for our third switch and the V switches 0 switch that we have by default it also has the default port group let me show you if I go to port groups you see this one that says VM Network that's what's assigned to the ports on that V switch is 0 and again I could assign different port groups to the same switch much like we would have different VLANs on a Cisco Catalyst switch but I'm trying to make it easy to visualize so I'm going to create a different port group for each switch I'll say add port group and I'll call this one PG 1 or group 1 I'll not worry about the VLAN because I'm consuming all the ports on the switch with this port group and it's gonna be associated with switch SW 1 V so poor group 1 PG 1 that goes with SW 1 V we'll add that let's add a second port group you guessed it it's called PG 2 and it's going to be associated with switch to V will add that let's create a third port group PG three and its associated with SW 3 V we've now added our switches we've added our port groups we are now ready to install those routers those see us our 1,000 V's so I want to go to virtual machines and I don't have any right now so I'm going to say create register VM and again I'm not using the OVA file here because there was a compatibility issue with that version of CSR 1000 V and my version of ESXi which is 6.7 so I want to say create a new virtual machine so next I'll give it a name of r1 and for compatibility reasons I don't want to select ESXi 6.7 now your mileage is gonna vary if you're using a different version of the CSR 1000 V I'm showing you what's compatible with that free version that you can download if you're able to download one of those 16x versions yeah you might be fine with another version of ESXi but I'm gonna say I want to be compatible with esxi 5.0 virtual machine and maybe other combinations and permutations work as well but I did some experimentation and this is what I found works so I'm gonna stick with that and I'll say the guest operating system is Linux and the specific flavor of Linux that I found would work is other 2.4 X Linux 64-bit and we'll say next I've only got one data store so I'll select that as my data store one CPU is fine memory needs to be 2.5 gig so I'll change megabytes to gigabytes and put in 2.5 8 gig hard drive is fine network adapter one I'll say I want to connect that to VM network let's add another network adapter and I'll say I want to connect that to port Group 1 so this is gonna be sitting between my lab network which connects into the port group named VM Network and router r2 which is also going to connect into port Group a PG 1 and before we start configuring IP addresses on these routers I'll confirm what interface is associated with which port group and for the CD I want to boot off that ISO file so instead of host device I'm gonna say datastore ISO file let's select that ISO file I'll say select and we're done I'll say next and finish let's get this machine started after it pops up here I'll click on it and the installation takes a while let's go ahead and close these notification boxes out let's go ahead and click on the power on button and they'll give me a virtual console what I like to do is to go under actions and say open this in a new tab so this would be in a new tab we can check in with and like I say it's gonna take several several minutes to finish this while we're working on this install we'll just go back and install our other virtual machines so let's go back I'll close this one out let's go back to virtual machines and I'll just quickly run through the other two it'll be exactly what we did before I'll say create a new machine this is going to be called r2 we'll select YES xi5 dot zero virtual machine Linux other linux version 2.4 x 64-bit that's our only data store we're gonna have one CPU 2.5 gigabytes into port Group 1 I want to have another network adapter that's connected to port group 2 and we're going to boot off our data store iso file which is this one will select it will say next and finish and once it pops up we'll start it and then go install our other virtual machine so let's click on our - we'll say power on and once it pops up I'll put it in a separate tab as well I'll say actions open console in new tab so now let's see what's going on here's the r-1 install going on here's our to getting started let's go create our three so back to virtual machines one more time I'll close out this console window and we'll say create register new virtual machine so one final time this one is going to be called our three esxi 5.0 virtual machine Linux other 2.4 dot X Linux 64-bit that's our data store one CPU 2.5 gigabytes of memory 8 gig of hard drive space 1 network adapter is going to connect to port group 2 let's add another network adapter that's going to connect to port group 3 and we want to boot off our data store iso file and that looks great we'll say next and finish and once it pops up we'll start it so it can begin the installation let's power that on and they'll say that I want to open this in another tab so now we've got tabs for each of our routers and I'm gonna enlarge this just a bit to make it a little bit easier to view and we still don't even have r1 installed yet we don't have to do anything it's a non-interactive installation the first prompt we're going to see where we have to respond to anything is just like when you turn on a brand new router and it's asking do you want to go through the setup wizard and I'm gonna say no to that but I don't have to have the video running and you having to watch the entire installation screen so I'm just gonna pause the video here and we'll be back in a moment when it's prompting us whether or not we want to go through that setup script after waiting several more minutes we were finally presented with this prompt asking us if we want to enter the initial configuration dialog this was that setup wizard I was talking about I want to say no to this we'll give it a moment to come back with a prompt and then we're gonna set this up much like we would setup any other or Cisco router we'll say enable and right now I'm connected via a console connection through VMware ESXi and a couple of things I want to do to that line so it doesn't timeout on me and so I don't get all that word wrapping like I'm getting right now I'm gonna go in to global config I'll go into line console 0 and I'll say logging synchronous so I don't have that line wrapping issue that I'm having now and I'll say exec timeout zero space zero so it's not gonna timeout on me something else I like to do in global configuration mode is to say no IP domain - look up that way if I type in something that's not correct instead of Cisco IOS 6e interpreting that is some sort of a dns name it tries to resolve I'll say no don't do any domain lookup let's set the hostname this is going to be r1 and before I do any configuration with IP addresses I want to go back to my VMware ESXi console and just confirm what interfaces are connected to r1 so let's go back to our one scroll down just a bit and let's see network adapter one is connected to PG one network adapter two is connected to my VM Network okay so this network adapter - it's gonna be my second interface it's connected to my lab network and by the way this can get really tricky because you might have noticed when I initially set this up I let the default network adapter be connected to the VM Network and then I added the network adapter and I connected it to PG one so you might have assumed as high did originally that that second adapter would be network adapter - when in reality it became network adapter one so careful with that always want to double check so let's go assign these IP addresses I'll go to r1 and let's do a do show IP interface brief just to see what the interface names are I've got two interfaces Gigabit Ethernet one Gigabit Ethernet two and I know that Gigabit Ethernet one is actually connected as we see right here to my port Group one to the 172 dot 16.1 0/24 Network so let's go into interface gigabit one and I'll say IP address 170 2.16 dot 1.2 with a 24-bit subnet mask let's administrator please bring it up with a no shutdown command well it's going to interface gigabit - and I'll say its IP address is one ninety two dot one sixty eight dot 1.15 with a 24-bit subnet mask and let's administratively bring it up and I'm just gonna run OSPF we'll just have one area and everybody's gonna run to SPF I'll create a no SPF process ID of one and just to encompass all the interfaces on this router I'll just say network 0.0.0.0 with a wildcard mask of all 255 s and I'll say area 0 and we are done I'm going to do a a right you can do a copy run star and that's gonna make this available after I shut this down and bring it back up it's gonna remember my configuration let's go do a very similar thing on router r2 let's say no I don't want to enter the configuration dialog and while it's settling down let's go back to our console and see what interfaces are connected to which port groups it looks like network adapter 1 is connected to port group 2 okay that's the 10.1.1.1 is 24 Network now we're good after 2 is connected to PG 1 ok great let's go set all that up first of all I'll go in to enable mode then I'll do a config term line con zero to get rid of that really annoying word rap issue all say logging synchronous exact timeout zero space zero no IP domain look up we'll set the hostname to r2 and I'll go into interface gigabit one and that's gonna be connected to the 10.1.1.10 t4 networks all assign the IP address of 10.1.1.1 with a 24-bit subnet mask administratively bring it up well that's going to interface to gigabit 2 and its IP address is going to be 170 2.16 dot one dot one with a 24-bit subnet mask administratively bring it up let's start on OSPF writing process here by the way these are locally significant process IDs the the ones that I put on these different routers they did not have to match I'm just doing it to pick a number or I'll say network 0.0.0.0 with a wildcard mask of all 255 s everybody belongs to area 0 and in just a moment if things worked well we should have a no SPF adjacency come up between routers r1 and r2 in fact it looks like that just happened let's do a show IP ospf neighbor do I have a neighbor yes I do excellent things are working good so far now let's go to all let's go ahead and save this I'll do a copy run star and let's go to our three and I'll say no I do not want to enter the configuration dialog let's go confirm what interfaces are connected to what port groups on our three looks like networking after one is connected to port group three that's 10.1 2.0 size 24 network adapter - that'll be gig - that's connected to 10.1.1.1 for great let's go back to our three in a ball global config let's go into line con zero logging synchronous and then we'll say exec timeout zero space is zero no IP domain lookup set the hostname to r3 let's go into interface gigabit 1 it's going to have an IP address of ten dot one dot two dot one with a 24-bit subnet mask no shot-down interface gigabit to IP address is 10.1.1.1 24-bit subnet mask administrative lee bring it up let's create a routing process again and I'll say network 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 everybody belongs to area zero oh and I gave an incorrect Network statement there I should have put a 255 right there there we go now in just a moment we should have an OSPF adjacency come up give it just a moment for that to happen you looks like we're up let's see if I now know all the networks some are 3u let's do a show IP route look at this I have learned a couple of networks via OSPF I've learned the one ninety two dot one sixty eight dot one dot zero size twenty four network I've learned the 172 dot 16 dot 1.0 network I learned all that vo OSPF can I ping the farm to this network can I ping one ninety two dot one sixty eight dot one dot 15 that's my lab facing interface on our one I sure can so I've got full connectivity throughout my lab network and this was a free way and I say free that's assuming that we have hardware to install a VMware ESXi on but if we do this was a free lab that's running real Cisco IOS that I was able to build and with three routers I could do a lot but I'm not limited to three routers if I've got plenty of capacity on my server that's running VMware then I could have lots and lots of routers you can lab up a CCI a routes which lab on this thing if you have enough capacity and with a network interface cards I have on my server that's running these virtual routers I could connect out to some real gear so even though I'm not doing a switch here I can connect out to actual Cisco Catalyst two switches so this is an inexpensive way to get started building a fairly robust lab using a Cisco's CSR 1000 V

Channel: Kevin Wallace Training, LLC

Views: 32,285

Rating: 4.9582462 out of 5

Keywords: cisco, csr, csr 1000v, cloud services router, ccna, 200-125, icnd1, icnd2, ccent, route, tshoot, #kwtrain

Id: EKpvpS9qxss

Length: 24min 50sec (1490 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 23 2018