Petition to Increase Cisco VIRL Node Limit

Cisco VIRL is a great tool but it is artificially limited to a maximum of 15 nodes today. I have created a petition to collect names to send to Cisco, to show that the community really wants to increase this limit to at least 30 nodes.

Please go sign the petition if you are interested in seeing VIRL get support for more than 15 nodes.

Please sign here.

A Short Update on CML from #CLUS

Hey everyone,

I’ve been having a really good time here at Cisco Live US. Here is a short update on CML.

General Info

CML is being released end of June or beginning of July. The corporate edition with
a base license and support for up to 15 nodes will be listed at around 13000$ per year.
If you subscribe for two years, the discount is 5% and for three years it is 10%
Normally 15 nodes cost around 13000$ per year so basically you get 5 nodes for “free”
if you get the base package which has the SKU R-CML-CE-K9=.
IOS will be supported by running IOSv. Every IOSv image requires around 512 MB of memory.

System Requirements:

• The Cisco Modeling Labs server runs on VMware ESXi 5.0, 5.1, and 5.5.
• Recommended – Cisco UCS®
• C220 M3 Rack Server with 16 core CPU and 128 GB memory or Cisco UCS
• C460 M2 High-Performance Rack Server or higher model (actual memory and CPU consumption depends
  on the number of virtual nodes and virtual network OS types). To help determine the appropriate memory
  please find the Cisco Modeling Labs Calculator at http://www.cisco.com/go/cml.

• Following are the minimum hardware and software requirements to support the Cisco Modeling Labs client:
  PC:
  ● RAM – 2 GB
  ● Disk space – 1 GB
  ● Network – Any standard IP-based (non-serial, using IPv4) network card
  ● Windows 7 and 8
  ● Java Runtime Environment version 6 or 7
  ● Browser – FireFox, Chrome

Adding Nodes

If you need to add more nodes you can buy them in packs of 10, 50 or 100. These are
the SKUs for adding IOSv nodes:

• L-CML-CE-10N=
• L-CML-CE-50N=
• L-CML-CE-100N=

If you buy 50 nodes you get a 5% discount and for 100 nodes it’s a 10% discount.
The 10 node package costs around 13000$ so multiply that with five and then times
0.95 if you want the price for the 50 node package which is around 61750$

IOS XR

IOS XR will be supported by running the XRv image. These are separate from the
IOSv ones. This is the SKU for XRv:

L-XRV-CMLSIM-1YR/=

I didn’t receive any pricing for the XR license.

XRv is expected to use 3072MB of RAM.

IOS XE

IOS XE will of course be supported through CSR1000v. I don’t have any pricing for
it but these are the SKUs:

• L-CSR-10M-STD-1Y= CSR 1000V e-PAK 1-year subscription 10 Mbps Standard Package
• L-CSR-10M-ADV-1Y= CSR 1000V e-PAK 1-year subscription 10 Mbps Advanced Package
• L-CSR-10M-PRM-1Y= CSR 1000V e-PAK 1-year subscription 10 Mbps Premium Package

The CSR1000v image is expected to use 3072 MB of RAM.

Virtual Machines

The environment is based on Openstack. You are free to deploy as many VMs as you wish.
These will not be counted against your node license.

Support for other Images

The CML 1.0 release will contain support for IOS, IOS XE and IOS XR. Every BU is
developing software and providing that to CML. So it depends on the BU if it can
be included in CML. Nexus support seems to be close, they were able to run it
in the demo but it hasn’t been tested fully yet. Other images like the ASAv
are not supported yet but they are looking into it.

Switching

Everyone wants to see switching, for those of you familiar with the CCIE lab there
is a L2IOU image that they use for switching. Cisco is working on implementing switching
but it’s not there yet. If everything goes well it could be added by the end of the year
but don’t take my word on that.

Visualization

This is a picture from what the GUI looks like:

One of the nice features of CML is that you can see the BGP peerings, what the OSPF areas
look like and when links go down. It also has something called Autonetkit that helps you
to deploy a configuration. You choose which features you want and if you want both v4 and
v6 or just one of them and then it deploys the configuration for you.

Support

This is what the datasheet says on support. There will be TAC support for corporate edition.

“Support and Services
Cisco Modeling Labs 1.0 Corporate Edition includes integrated online help and
learning tools to familiarize users with the application’s features and facilitate
training on the product. In addition, customers who subscribe to Cisco
Learning Network can find free informational videos in the e-learning portal,
and corporate customers can access additional training content at
Cisco Technical Education.
Technical support is provided under the Cisco Software Application Services agreement attached to the product”

VIRL

There have been rumors for a while now about a personal edition supposedly supporting
up to 15 nodes and that this version would be free or priced at around 100$ This could
not be confirmed. They are still discussing what to do with this product. I really
hope it comes out be I will update when I know more about it. This product will
only have community support if it comes out, no help from TAC.

More Information

Cisco has an URL for CML which you can find here. It’s still being updated so there isn’t a ton of information yet.
If you comment on this post I will try to ask a few questions before I leave. I will update
the post as I get more information.

Cisco VIRL – Let’s go viral!

Cisco VIRL

Most of you have probably heard something about VIRL already. There were
some rumors going around and then at Cisco Live, Joel Obstfeld from Cisco did a demo of Cisco VIRL. VIRL is a tool running on Openstack and KVM according to Ivan Pepelnjak.

With VIRL it’s possible to run virtual IOS, NXOS, IOS-XE and IOS-XR. Refer to posts by Ivan, Bob and Tom for more information about VIRL.

What can it be used for?

Here are some ideas on how to use it:

• Create Proof of Concept (PoC) to demonstrate to potential customers
• Training
• Try changes in a simulated environment before you deploy it
• Test features before deploying them in your network
• Create a replica of customers network to be familiar with it
• Recreate errors so that TAC can work on them outside of production

These are just some things that I thought VIRL would be useful for.

What can I do to spread the word?

I would like to encourage everyone to spread the word on VIRL, let’s go viral! For any
professional networking individual the importance of this tool could be huge. Blog about
VIRL, tweet about it. Approach your Cisco account team, let them know you are interested
in trying it out. The more pressure we put on Cisco, hopefully they make the right decisions
when releasing it.

What do I want to see from VIRL?

From what I’ve read about VIRL most of aspects of it seem very promising. I just hope Cisco
gets the packaging right. I hope to see a free version that everyone can use for training
and certifications. This would be huge for the community and would make it easy to choose
Cisco as the preferred vendor.

There might be an appliance or commercial version. This will cost some money. That is fine,
it costs money to produce code and support it. I would still urge Cisco to not overprice it
though. The value you would be adding to enterprises would be coming back tenfold in fewer
TAC cases and increased product sales.

Will it be crippled? For the CSR1000v there is a bandwidth cap which is a great way of
producing a free router without crippling it further. I hope to see the same from VIRL.
Don’t cripple it in other ways and don’t make it a licensing jungle.

I hope that VIRL can be easily deployed together with VMs for testing things like multicast
and injecting BGP routes and so on.

So go on, spread the word! And let’s hope VIRL becomes everything we want it to be.