IOSv in GNS3

Following on from the Cisco ViRL - a first taste! post where I said that I was going to try and get the IOSv image working in GNS3 I have done a bit of playing around. After a few misses I finally got it working. So here is my walk through.

Firstly you need to get the ova file out of the onePk image - once you have loaded the onePk vm you can connect to it using WinSCP and get the ova file from /usr/share/vmcloud/data/images/vios.ova.

Importing the onePK vIOS ova file into VirtualBox

I first tried setting the IOSv image up as a VirtualBox guest and adding it to GNS3 that way. No go, and it bluescreened my laptop. DONT TRY THIS AT HOME KIDS!

Creating a vIOS Qemu guest (attempt 1)

Secondly I tried to create a Qemu guest by extracting the files from the ova and running a bunch of qemu commands to create an img file. I didn't get a bluescreen, and the image loaded, but nothing much happened after that, and I couldn't console onto it. So it was pretty useless.

Creating a vIOS Qemu guest (attempt 2)

The second attempt, and the one that works it to first extract the contents of the ova file. make sure that the Qemu settings in GNS3 work, so the All-in-One version of the GNS3 software is best, so that you get all the Qemu goodness.

The resulting vmdk can be run directly as a qemu guest. So with the following settings:

Qemu-flavor: -x86_64
Identifier name: anything you like
Binary Image: the extracted vmdk file
RAM: 384Mb works well, though Cisco recommend 512Mb
Number of Nics: anyting up to 8
NIC Model: e1000

You can then drag a Qemu guest onto GNS3. If you want one, drag on two and delete the first one, for some reason it didnt seem to like the first one, probably due to a numbering thing with the telnet ports.

When you click on boot the Qemu screen will come up, it will appear to hang at "Booting 'IOSv', this is fine, you should now be able to console onto the devices. I added one 7200 router (R1) with two gigabit ethernet interfaces (1.1.1.1/24 and 2.2.2.1/24) and three vIOS images (deleting the first one). The IOSv images had IP addresses 1.1.1.2 and 2.2.2.2 connecting them to the 7200 via gi 0/1, and 3.3.3.1 and 3.3.3.2 connecting them to each other vis gi 0/0. CDP worked, and so did ping:

I have uploaded a video showing all of the steps.

Enjoy your brand new IOSv!

Author : Unknown

CCIE #49337, author of CCNA and Beyond, BGP for Cisco Networks, MPLS for Cisco Networks, VPNs and NAT for Cisco Networks.

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