#CLEAR CONFIG ASA GNS3 SERIAL#

It appears to be a bug related to serial console setups, and I found that by just making sure the VM actually has a serial port present, the “press any key” prompts appear 10 times over 10 seconds and then the normal GRUB boot menu appears and auto-boots within another second or two. My Windows laptop has 8 GB of RAM, and I can basically run two CSRs with 3 GB of RAM allocated before I’m maxing out my host’s RAM.Īdding the serial port (even without connecting it) was important here as I discovered that without the serial port, the GRUB boot loader hangs at a “press any key to continue” prompt pretty much indefinitely. Make no mistake that even with the somewhat reduced RAM requirement for the CSR with version 3.10 and later, running more than a couple of these will require a pretty beefy machine. Cloning the CSR through VirtualBox does correctly result in the clone router generating a new UDI/serial number on its next boot. If you clone them, just make sure to select the option to generate new MAC addresses for the interfaces. You could either create them individually, or use the “Clone” function within VirtualBox. Note that if you want multiple CSRs in your lab, you will need to create multiple VMs. You can power down the VM at this point, and remove the ISO from the CD configuration of the VM. If you wait for it to reboot you will eventually get to the familiar IOS boot messages and a “Router>” prompt.

#CLEAR CONFIG ASA GNS3 INSTALL#

During the first boot, the CSR will install itself to the hard drive:Īfter the install is complete, it will reboot itself. Set the CD-ROM to use the install ISO image, and boot the VM. In the screenshot below you’ll see that I added additional NICs, but this wasn’t necessary. Just about everything else can be left to defaults. Important: Serial Ports: Enable Serial port 1, but you can leave it in Disconnected port state for now. RAM: 2560-4096 MB (as of 3.10, a minimum of 2.5 GB is supported for basic operation) The VM settings for the CSR are very straight-forward:

#CLEAR CONFIG ASA GNS3 MAC OS X#

I’m sure this can be done on Mac OS X or Linux but I’ve always had trouble getting GNS3 and VirtualBox both working nicely with each other on any platform besides Windows.

I should note that I did all this on a Windows machine as I feel that is actually the best platform for GNS3 these days - or at least it’s the one that in my experience requires the least fiddling to get all the extra bits working. Anyway, if you haven’t already, install Oracle VirtualBox.

I didn’t go back and try this with the 3.9 release to see, so that may well be true. In some cursory investigation, I found this blog article which suggests that the CSR’s flexibility only came around in the 3.10 release. It turns out with the current version, it’s really quite trivial. I expected installing the CSR to a VirtualBox VM to be a serious pain. Save the ISO locally, and you’re ready to build a router. I simply went to Cisco’s site, logged in (even a guest-level account should be able to access this download) and found the current version of the CSR (3.11 as of this writing) in the downloads section. In order to install the CSR in a non-VMWare environment, you need to download the ISO install image rather than the OVA. Well, OK, perhaps it’s possible to get it going with QEMU as I also noticed in the release notes for the 3.11 release that Linux KVM is a supported hypervisor now, but VirtualBox seemed the path of lesser resistance to me so that’s the way I went. The key to running the CSR1000V in GNS3 is running it in VirtualBox. Last night I decided to see if it could be done.

#CLEAR CONFIG ASA GNS3 TRIAL#

The CSR1000V is attractive as it provides a means to run IOS-XE, the same variant as on the ASR-series routers, and unlike Dynamips, Cisco has blessed use of the CSR with the 2.5 Mb/s throughput-limited trial license as a legitimate labbing platform. Since then, I occasionally see that some readers land on my blog after searching for the terms “CSR1000V GNS3” looking for assistance in integrating the CSR with the popular networking simulation platform.

#CLEAR CONFIG ASA GNS3 FULL#

The better part of a year ago when the Cisco CSR1000V was publicly released, I quickly tested the notion of running the Cloud Services Router in VMWare Fusion on the Mac, rather than on a full vSphere server.

Clear config asa gns3