I’m sure you’ve all heard of Cisco IOU by now, and I’m finally catching up with the other bloggers of the world by mentioning it.  It’s an executable version of an IOS image that runs on a Unix (or Unix-like) platform and it’s the backend behind Cisco’s Learning Labs.  Instead of running an emulator and loading up various images, you just run the executable and you’re on the console of a Cisco router.  It has layer 2 support, so you can fire up switches as well.  Being a binary makes it way more efficient than GNS3 will ever be, and the layer 2 support is a wonderful, wonderful feature to have.

I’m way behind in talking about this, but Jeremy Stretch over at Packetlife.net has a community lab that is free to use.  This is a great resource for those of us who are too poor to have their own physical devices for Cisco studies.  All you need is an account on the site and a sense of community.

There are two labs to reserve, and each contains a firewall, routers, and switches.  This is plenty of stuff to get your feet wet with the gear, let you research some functionality that Cisco promised is great, and to lab out something you’re looking to implement.  The lab is offered for free, but Jeremy is giving his time and money for this lab.  I think it would be a great idea to drop a few dollars to him via his donate link if you use his stuff.   If you’re a regular user and don’t donate, I ask that you do a moral inventory on yourself so you might see just how bad you are being.

I was thinking about firing off some GNS3 labs as exercises for everyone to use.  My thought was that I could generate a few small networks with a requirements doc and have people do the leg work as practice or for a study aid.  You know, configure OSPF over this frame relay network or GLBP for load-balancing gateways.  I gave up on that dream (like I do a lot of them), and wound up clicking around on GNS3 Vault.  Rene Molenaar has already thought ahead and developed about 60 labs exercises that can be downloaded.