[c-nsp] VIRL vs GNS3 vs Else for Automation practicing

[adamv0025 at netconsultings.com]

> Sami Joseph
> Sent: Monday, May 21, 2018 5:00 AM
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'd like to practice automation, specifically Ansible on different network
> operating systems, Cisco, Cumulus, Juniper.
> 
> VIRL costs money but it has the IOS images bundled, GNS3 doesnt but i'll
> have to find the images, other than that, does anyone have any feedback ?
> 
For me personally both of these tools were too slow to setup -because of the
GUI. 
Even in the good old days of c7200 I rather used the raw Dynamips config
files to simulate large scale networks as it was much quicker to set up and
more stable than GNS3.
Now when the whole world is virtual it's just KVM + OVS + Ansible to setup
virtual lab of hundreds of connections when simulating complete networks. 

But I guess for you to get started with Ansible a simple lab with couple of
nodes and links would be fine and for such a task GNS3 GUI is the easiest
option I guess.
 
adam

netconsultings.com
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