Milan Zapletal submitted the source code for a huge lab topology they built with netlab. It has almost 50 routers and over 50 Linux nodes to emulate end-users and servers.

They used netlab to configure VLANs, VRFs, IS-IS, OSPF, EIGRP, BGP, MPLS, VXLAN, and EVPN. Imagine how long it would take to configure all that by hand using a more traditional labbing tool.

The lab uses devices from three different vendors, and some of those devices are known resource hogs. Consequently, they needed a server with 128GB of RAM and 32 CPU cores, and it still took 30 minutes to start the lab – they had to start the routers in batches of eight to avoid timeouts due to CPU overloads.

Did you build an exciting lab with netlab? Write a comment, send me an email, create a pull request in the netlab-examples repository, or describe your work in a GitHub discussion.