Cisco router simulator

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!