Run a Cisco Router on your PC
If you need to try test and configure a Cisco 7200 or 3600 series router, you have got a friend in the open source world.
Christophe Fillot's Dynamips is a Linux based application that is used to emulate the hardware of the Cisco 7200 router platform but now extends support Cisco 3600 series (3620, 3640 and 3660), 3700 series (3725, 3745) and 2600 series (2610 to 2650XM, 2691) routing platforms. A windows version based on Cygwin is also available to download. Unlike many other router simulators Dynamips allows you to boot real Cisco IOS software images and build complex network topologies to test the functionality of IOS on your desktop PC, be it Linux or Windows based and available in 32bit and 64bit versions.
With the introduction of the 0.2.5 release, it is now possible to run the emulator as an "hypervisor" to start and control many virtual router instances simultaneously.
Following tools make life with DynaMips much easier.
Dynagen (http://dyna-gen.sourceforge.net/), by Greg Anuzelli, is a front-end (written in Python) that makes lab simulation with the hypervisor very easy: it uses an INI-like configuration file to provision Dynamips emulator networks. It takes care of specifying the right port adapters, generating and matching up those pesky NIO descriptors, specifying bridges, frame-relay, ATM switches, etc. It also provides a management CLI for listing devices, suspending and reloading instances, etc. You can also distribute virtual instances across different servers to set up complex labs. To begin with Dynagen, you can consult this very complete tutorial (http://dyna-gen.sourceforge.net/tutorial.htm).
Dynagui (http://dynagui.sourceforge.net/) is a graphical front-end written by Yannick Le Teigner. It uses Dynagen to communicate with the hypervisor.
There is also a blog appropriately named 7200 Router Simulator where author discusses development and beta version information and where I got hold of the version 0.2.7 of the DynaMips.
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