How I Use Cisco Labs for Free | Free Lab Access with DevNet & dCloud | Rich Tech Guy

do you want to practice on cisco routers and switches and are looking for a way to access them well watch this video i'm going to show you a couple ways that you can access cisco labs for free hi i'm rich welcome to the rich tech guy channel and if you saw my last video on vxlan you might notice that i had a lab built out consisting of six nexus 9000 switches you can actually go watch that video here i can link it down in the description below but with those 9000 switches i mean those things cost about tens of thousands of dollars a piece and having six of them lying around that's a lot of money so how did i get a lab like that set up well the truth is i actually used labs cisco had available and i use them for free and i'm going to show you how you can do that but first before we start on that if you like this content go ahead and hit that like button and hit the subscribe button for more of this type of content from the rich tech guy channel now let's get into it alright the first website that i'm going to show you on accessing cisco labs is one called devnet and if you haven't already been to this website i highly suggest you check this out this website is full of information put out by cisco on how to interface and access with their devices utilizing apis the if you want me to do a video about the devnet website and the tools and the resources there please go ahead and comment down below uh that that would be a great video topic to go into but for now what i'm going to show you is something called the sandbox labs so to access devnet we're going to go in here and we need to log into devnet now there are multiple ways that we can log in you can use github google facebook i'm going to use my cisco id which we're going to go through that login process here and so i'm not really going to show you what that is but anyways so now that we're logged into the devnet website what we're going to do is we've got these uh offerings here of what devnet has to offer and you can start and get a little bit of a tour of the website and go through some learning tracks uh there are video courses code exchange and ecosystem exchange for once you've started working with the apis and developing code what we're going to actually look at here is sandbox so in devnet we've got these sandbox labs and the one that i'm going to just showcase here is of course we've got all the technologies but i'm going to showcase here is just even referencing that last video i did on vxlan i'm going to hop into data center now you're going to get some of the uh the highlights of the labs here but instead what i'm going to do is i'm just going to explore all and i'm going to get a list of all of the data center labs currently available now when i go through here you've got aci simulators and by the way i do plan on doing a couple of videos about aci so that stay tuned and hit the subscribe button for that but what i'm going to show you for vxlan is actually this one here cisco data center network manager if you'll notice none of these actually say vxlan but when i pop into this one what i'm going to have as i scroll down through the information about the lab is i get this little chart of what the lab looks like and notice i've got some leaf switches i have four of them and i have a couple of spine switches this is perfect for doing a vxlan deployment so what we're going to do here is we would go up here and we would click reserve and we can schedule a time and actually work out what the reservation is here i've actually once we got this set up we would hit reserve but i've actually got one already reserved so what i can do is i can go into my sandbox labs here and notice it says one reservation so with that i will go ahead and open up the lab and how do you access these labs once you've got it reserved well what we're going to do is we're going to take a look at this one here called output and right here i've got vpn network setup username password and so i can go ahead and interface with it by utilizing a anyconnect vpn or even the windows vpn or if i'm running linux like i might be over on my other screen here i can utilize the vpn tools there it gives me a username and it gives me a password all right so now that i've got the vpn set up over in my linux environment here we're going to go ahead and we're going to actually take a look at accessing the lab so the credentials are for accessing the devices are supplied in the lab information and with that i can just simply go in and ssh to say leaf one which is 10.10.20 so the username it gave me is cisco and here we go it gives me it asks for a password which is also provided in the credentials and there i'm on the leaf one switch of the devnet lab and with this uh uh the way that's set up in the lab even though it's really designed for dc and m and utilizing dc m as i demonstrated in my previous video we can just use this for vxlan and actually the ospf and some of the bgp configuration is already done on this switch and so i can actually go in now and i can do a show ip ospf neighbors and right there it's already showing me my ospf neighbors i can also check what's going on on the bgp side uh show bgp the config that's already in there is the l2evpn part so l2 vpn ev evpn summary and now i've got some bgp information i can also check the routing table and i've already got the routes populated into the routing table so that's just a quick overview and a summary on how you can access these devnet labs as i said the devnet website is a great website for all sorts of resources on working with cisco and automating and programming cisco devices that's really what it's set up for but you as i've demonstrated you can use it for other things with the sandbox labs alright so the next lab environment that i'm going to show you is another one by offered by cisco and it's called d-cloud now the way d-cloud works is you do need a cisco id and the labs that you will have available to you on d-cloud will depend on the entitlements available for your cisco id but to access that website we're going to go to dcloud.cisco.com and i'm going to go ahead and log in now since i've already got the cisco login activated through my previous login to devnet it just kicks me straight on in so when i go into dcloud i get a catalog but before i actually go into the catalog i'm going to show you that d-cloud has various data centers all around the world so we've got one in singapore for asia-pacific there's one in london and then we've got two in the u.s one in rtp and one in san jose and i'm actually connected to the san jose one because i am in the u.s and i'm in the western half of the united states so that one makes the most sense for me however if i find i can't access a lab here sometimes i go scout around to the other data centers and take a look at what's available in those environments but back to this catalog here what we're going to do is we're going to do a quick catalog search and so yeah if i want to search vxlan it's going to go ahead and show me some labs i also again have one on data center network manager and then i've also got another data center network manager here i've got a cisco vxlan configuration v1 and this is identified as a sandbox lab so if i want to go into this one and i can get some information about this is it's going to talk to me about what this lab covers it's going to go over some of the components give me a little overview about the the topology there's a little bit more detail if you click on resources it's actually going to download a pdf document with the full detail and a walkthrough of the lab if you choose to do the walkthrough once you're familiar with a particular lab environment you can actually just start going and playing around with it yourself now if you want to schedule that lab you're going to go ahead and click schedule and let's schedule a single session and so this is where it can go ahead and i can set the time for it to be scheduled based off of my current time zone so if i want to schedule it here to start at 10 a.m on on this tuesday i can go ahead and do that and it gives it to me for a block of four hours i can extend the block as i want i can also even go into further detail by going up to the top here and i can actually just click on now rather than set the time so i can click on now and it will just go ahead and kick off the lab right away when i click next here it's going to ask me some questions about why i'm doing this lab but my primary use so it gives you a list of options and it might be just wanting to train myself so i can do a test drive on the lab here or uh you know i want to just develop an application to work with this lab so there's various options here so i'll do a just i want to do a test drive here there's no revenue impact i can give myself as the customer there's some additional optional information and i schedule that now once i've got this scheduled it's going to kick off an email to me and say hey at this time you got this lab ready to go and uh when the lab actually hits that point to activate the thing you do need to be aware of is it can take about 10 to 20 minutes to actually activate the lab so it will go in and it will start configuring so after going through the scheduling process and getting the lab started we now come into our session screen and this will show our lab is all set up and we can now click view and go into the lab itself so as we go in here we don't actually need to set up a vpn like we did previously in this one what i can actually do is i can just go ahead and open up this workstation here and i can just remote desktop onto it from inside of my browser and as it logs in here we go we are now in and what i can do now is i can open up google chrome and i've got these connections here so i can open up the leaf one cli and here it gives me a login and password and just check if that works no that didn't work uh by the way i've been in d cloud a few times there are a few sort of standard login and passwords so i just tend to guess my way through them and there we go so now i'm in this leaf switch i can do a quick show run i can see what's going on with the configuration as i go into it already and as i'm looking at it i see already a vrf set up i don't see any layer 3 configuration on interfaces looks like we've got a couple of loopbacks set up but that is pretty much what we've got there looks like i've got a fresh uh instance here of this switch with just some some basic config on here that i can actually start configuring vxlan so that is another option that you might have available now with these labs you can also set up in any connect session and you can connect remotely through a vpn connection as well this is what dcloud offers you as another free lab resource now while the devnet and the d-cloud lab options are really great labs let me introduce you to the software behind a lot of that and if you're looking to just be able to build your own labs on the fly and configure them as you want them then this might be something that interests you but the this option is unfortunately not going to be a free option and before i go into any further detail on it i will just say i am not employed by cisco and i'm not being paid by cisco to talk about this product or to push this product but i do find it a an excellent option if you are willing to spend a little bit of money but it's a fraction of what it would be to buy the the real equipment and that would be something called cisco modeling labs which you can get as an individual for a license that costs you two hundred dollars per year and you can deploy that as a vm as i have done or you can deploy it uh in a bare metal situation directly onto a computer but what i'm going to do is i'm going to just go through and provide a quick walkthrough of the cisco modeling lab that i have set up and you can go in and you can create labs as you like them this is just a quick one i have to play around with the nexus 9000 interface if i go back into the dashboard here if you want to go take a look at my spanning tree videos you'll find that this was the lab i actually used for that that i set up for demonstrating spanning tree and in here you've got the ability here to add some additional devices and you can go take a look at these but one of the things you do want to keep in mind as you have your environment built out and you know what your system is capable of or the resources you've assigned to the virtual machine for cisco modeling labs is let's go say i go and take a look at a ios based switch so essentially a catalyst switch now if i scroll down here this will tell me what the memory and the cpu requirements are for deploying that okay but if i instead go and i take a look at a nexus 9000 series switch the uh requirements here are going to get a little bit bigger here this actually requires eight gigabytes of memory in order to deploy an and two virtual cpus so depending on what you're deploying cisco modeling labs you may be limited in what you can deploy and this is even reflected in what i've got here where i could really only support one instance of nexus 9000 on here whereas i can support multiple ios switches so depending on what i want to run i may be able to do this here or i may have to go looking on dcloud or devnet to access the kind of lab that i actually want to access and if i want to add nodes i've got this little add node window here to where i can just go along and say i want to add an asa into the network and i can set that up i can draw out a link from the asa over to a particular switch here so i'm going to drop it here and i can set up that particular link now when i select a device here i can go into the console and i can open up the console and i can actually start playing around with it inside of the the lab in here or once i set these up and i do actually have these set up for ssh capability is i have this external connection and this actually ties into my own network so then i can access it through either the computer that i'm using here i can access it through any computer really on my network to get to these devices as if they were real physical devices in my environment so it's a great option as i said it's it does require spending a little bit of money and you do have to be aware of the resources that you have in in order to decide what you want to deploy these are really just some some great labs that and lab options that you can use for working with cisco devices and practicing and even writing code and doing some automation for say devnet dcloud also lets you play around with it from that perspective really just overall great resources that you can use when studying for just personal knowledge or studying for a cisco certification so that's really all i've got for you here and again if you like this content go ahead and hit that like button hit the subscribe button go check out some of the videos i've linked in the description below as i said the spanning tree or the vxlan and keep learning and keep studying and thank you very much for watching you

Channel: RichTechGuy

Views: 522

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Cisco, DevNet, Labs, CCNA, CCNP, CCIE, Networking, Routing, Switching, Catalyst, Nexus, Firewall

Id: As6W4ReCdJQ

Length: 20min 43sec (1243 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 13 2021