How to emulate Junos in GNS3

How to emulate Juniper Routers

• How to install Junos in GNS3
• How to emulate Junos in GNS3

Hello all, here we are again with the second part of the series on how to install and emulate Junos (Juniper's Networks Network Operating System) in GNS3 so that you can study and prepare without spending insane amount of money on real hardware. In the last article of the series I've just described what Junos and Olive are and how it is now possible to emulate it with the help of GNS3 giving and idea of what is needed to succeed.

Just as a quick recap, in case you're lazy like me, here's what you'll need to turn your home PC into a fully functional Juniper Router (Olive) host :

- A Linux host (most of this will work on Windows as well)

- A package called Qemu

- Qemu acceleration package

- Junos itself (again don't ask for it!)

- An ISO of FreeBSD

In my lab and while writing this article I've used FreeBSD 4.11 Mini-inst ISO which can be downloaded here just because I had it laying around my HDD and did not want to download again another version to the best of my knowledge you can also use version 6 or even 7 of FreeBSD as long as it supports Intel e1000 interface driver (which is supported since version 4.5 of FreeBSD).

Once you've downloaded the ISO file all you have to is to install Qemu package, it is a standard package of Fedora repositories, and Qemu acceleration which is used to enhance Qemu virtualization performances and under Linux can be obtained through two different packages which are KVM and Kqemu, again in my examples I'm using the latter one. To install these two packages simply issue the following command from the shell or via the Package Administration GUI interface :

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yum install qemu kqemu

Once everything is installed you're ready to create the FreeBSD virtual machine and begin the installation of the Operating System.

Unfortunately today time is against me so I'll just publish tomorrow the walkthrough on how to install and configure FreeBSD for Junos.

Stay tuned for the next article in the series and as always if you found the article interesting or helpful please digg it!

Lethe.

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