Fully virtualised L2-L7 environment
Posted: Sun Sep 08, 2019 11:44 am
Hi,
I have a HP DL380 running ESXi 6.7 that I use as a virutalised Windows and VMware lab environment; domain controllers, file servers, Exchange, Linux appliances, nested ESXi hosts etc. I'm very happy with this setup in terms of a server lab, but it's obviously a flat network environment and I can't do much in terms of networking.
I've used GNS3 standalone for some Cisco network labs, but what I really want is to have one unified virtualised lab, where I can run my VMs through virtualised multi-vendor switches, routers and security appliances.
I got pretty close to this in GNS3; a dozen or so VMs, multiple L2 and L3 network devices (mostly IOSvL2 and C7200), a pfSense firewall, and internet connectivity in and out.
However, performance was absolutely dire. All devices could ping each other (although with quite high latency), and basic domain functions such as DHCP, DNS, Kerberos etc all worked, but once I tried to do anything even mildly bandwidth intensive such as a file transfer between VMs across an IOSvL2, packets would begin dropping and the throughput was minimal. It was unusable at an application level. Server performance on the DL380 didn't appear to be bottle necking either.
So my question; is the limitation here the IOSvL2? Will I get better results out of the IOSvL2 with Eve-NG compared to GNS3? I suspect the IOSvL2 is limited in some way to not allow decent "production" performance, since the built-in GNS3 switch gave consistent 1-2ms latency. Is my dream of a fully virutalised layer 2 to layer 7 lab unattainable? Would love to hear from anybody who has this set up successfully.
I have a HP DL380 running ESXi 6.7 that I use as a virutalised Windows and VMware lab environment; domain controllers, file servers, Exchange, Linux appliances, nested ESXi hosts etc. I'm very happy with this setup in terms of a server lab, but it's obviously a flat network environment and I can't do much in terms of networking.
I've used GNS3 standalone for some Cisco network labs, but what I really want is to have one unified virtualised lab, where I can run my VMs through virtualised multi-vendor switches, routers and security appliances.
I got pretty close to this in GNS3; a dozen or so VMs, multiple L2 and L3 network devices (mostly IOSvL2 and C7200), a pfSense firewall, and internet connectivity in and out.
However, performance was absolutely dire. All devices could ping each other (although with quite high latency), and basic domain functions such as DHCP, DNS, Kerberos etc all worked, but once I tried to do anything even mildly bandwidth intensive such as a file transfer between VMs across an IOSvL2, packets would begin dropping and the throughput was minimal. It was unusable at an application level. Server performance on the DL380 didn't appear to be bottle necking either.
So my question; is the limitation here the IOSvL2? Will I get better results out of the IOSvL2 with Eve-NG compared to GNS3? I suspect the IOSvL2 is limited in some way to not allow decent "production" performance, since the built-in GNS3 switch gave consistent 1-2ms latency. Is my dream of a fully virutalised layer 2 to layer 7 lab unattainable? Would love to hear from anybody who has this set up successfully.