I managed to stumble onto dynamips (Cisco 7200 Simulator) while the name indicates 7200 the simulator (or emulator) supports 3600, 2691, 3725 and 3745 series routers.  So I set to out to try and get a 3640 running under VMware (as I couldn’t get it running under Windows cleanly).I had a CentOS 5 guest up and running so I downloadded the simulator and had a crack.  Don’t forget you will need a  valid supported IOS version for the router you wish to emulate. Once I had all of that I executed the following:

dynamips-0.27-RC3-x86.bin -P 3600 -P 0:NM-1FE-TX -s 0:0:linux_eth:peth0 C3640-I-.bin

And I had a console connection to the router… 

I found that the Linux installation didn’t come with any reference documentation and the web site didn’t help much so I downloaded the Win32 version as it had supported documentation.

You are able to add multiple “virtual” interfaces so you could emulate your testing, production environment which is very nice!

I have been working on a proof of concept for a virtualised clusterd file system and needed the ability to share several virtual disks.

The virtualisation platform I have been using is VMware Server and on the guest start-up it locks the virtual disks so it aint going to happen! After searching and much reviewing the VMware documentation I found the following configuration options that can be applied to the VMX configuration file for a given VM.

The following options allow you to share disks between one or more VM’s:

disk.locking = “false”
diskLib.dataCacheMaxSize = “0″

scsi0.sharedBus = “virtual”
scsi0:1.present = “TRUE”
scsi0:1.fileName = “pathToSharedDisk.vmdk”
scsi0:1.mode = “independent-persistent”
scsi0:1.redo = “”

Depending on the configuration you have you may need to change scsi0 to the bus id that your disks reside on and :1 for the scsi id and the fileName parameter to the path of your shared disks.

While setting this shared disk you need to ensure your using a cluster aware file system otherwise there is bound to be data corruption.

Good luck!