One of the toughest hurdles to overcome when building your own virtual networking lab is the slog of downloading VM images for your favorite network devices and building Vagrant boxes¹ in case you want to use them with Vagrant or netlab.

You can find box-building recipes on the Internet – codingpackets.com has a dozen of them – but they tend to be a bit convoluted and a smidge hard-to-follow the first time you’re trying to build the boxes (trust me, I’ve been there).

I finally had enough and built a simple scaffold for libvirt box-building. It takes the mundane parts out of the process:

• Starting a VM (you still have to download the disk image though)
• Killing the VM after you’re done with initial configuration
• Packing the VM disk as a Vagrant box and adding the desired metadata.

There are people out there who automated the whole process (example). I don’t want to be a perpetual maintainer of ever-changing quirks – you’ll still have to do a few bits on your own with the help of as-simple-as-they-can-get instructions.

The current netlab version can build Arista vEOS, Nexus 9300v, Cisco CSR, and Juniper vSRX boxes (you can always find the up-to-date list here). If you feel like contributing another box-building recipe please get in touch.

Other options:

• It seems like vrnetlab project automated building Docker containers for a number of platforms. You could build those, add them to netlab, and use the with containerlab platform.
• GNS3 is always an option for GUI enthusiasts.

Release History

2022-02-15

netsim-tools release 1.1.3 added build recipes for Cisco CSR and Juniper vSRX.