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Is There A Cisco-IOS Emulator?

Posted by Cliff on from the network-admins-get-all-of-the-fun dept.

Peter Berghmans asks: "Emulators everywhere today. It's not very difficult to run several OS-es at the same time. Just to try out something new, to develop, to learn. But I can't find an emulator for the Cisco-IOS. Although it would be usefull to learn about the OS of one of the most important pieces of hardware on the Internet: routers. Is there some development to run IOS under Linux?"

2 of 12 comments (clear)

  1. Try Zebra... by velkro · · Score: 4

    Zebra ( is still beta, last I looked) but is a full implementation of rip/ospf/bgp/etc... and the configuration interface is nearly identical to IOS.

    The benifit here is that it's real, so you can setup 2 (or more) boxes and actually *make something work* rather than paste commands blindly into an emulator. And, of course, it's GPL'd. Better than Merit's gated implementation of the above protocols, and easier to configure.

  2. cisco ios emulators by sybex by whi5tler · · Score: 4

    There are two versions from Sybex. One for ccna ($80), and one for ccnp ($300). I just got the ccna version. I found the ccna version at http://www1.fatbrain.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.asp ?theisbn=0782127282&vm= but I couldn't find the ccnp version for sale.

    Is there any effort being put into emulating a network? Do all of the configuration ahead of time, and just copy it over. or whatever elese we could dream up.