I have a love hate relationship with Gns3. It its a great appliaction to use to learn networking, but if your not careful you can spend more time fixing bugs in Gns3 than actually studying networking.
From a user perspective, there are two main components to GNS3. The first is the software interface which shows a visual representation of the network devices and enables the building of a network infrastructure.
I found videos by Daniel Bombal to be very helpful for GNS3 installation and VM setup for all platforms.
The second part is managing the network devices operating systems(IOS). The legacy way to run the IOS has been to install them on your machine and manage the memory resources.
In recent years, it is recommended to run the IOS in a VM. This method is more efficient and gives you more options
The main struggle for many engineers is normally obtaining the Cisco IOS. In all honesty, many savvy engineers end up downloading a torrent of the IOS. This breaches Cisco T&C’s as Cisco has a licensed version that you can purchase for studying. Please visit the Cisco website for the correct software.
For my studies, I am running the Cisco IOS on an i5 Windows 10 Laptop with 16GB of Ram and the VMplayer software. I have come across two key issues which I am listing below.
If you notice that in your server summary the VM fails to load please follow this advice below and disable/enable your VMnets. This will solve the issue.
https://gns3.com/community/featured/cannot-connect-to-compute-gns3-8
Secondly, if you notice that when you install the Cisco L2 Switch and try to power on the device that you get errors, and a failure to boot up appears. please follow the advice in the link below and remove the (machine type ‘pc-q35-4.2’) from the configure settings on the switch.
https://gns3.com/community/featured/ioslv2-qemu-process-has-stopped-return-code-1
Please add links below, if you notice any other errors.
Thanks
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