Week 04

This week i am going to carry on my research to find out best virtual network emulator that would be my test bed to the Firewall implementation along with the other supporting network environment.

i am going to use my high end home PC which is dell precision tower 7810 ( dual Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2600 v4 with 64 GB memory)

There are three high end network emulators can be found in the market and their names and features are listed below. it is required to have a class 1 hypervisor such as Vmware vSphere to install below emulators.

• Cisco VIRL (http://virl.cisco.com) : Cisco Virtual Internet Routing Lab (VIRL) is an extensible network virtualization platform that enables the development of high-fidelity models of real or planned networks.  VIRL includes current virtualized versions of Cisco network operating systems and allows integration with ‘real’ physical / external networks, network elements, and servers.

• GNS3 (https://www.gns3.com/) : is an open-source, free server/client interface meant for virtualization and network emulation. It is a Python based platform and supports Cisco 1700, 2600, 2691, 3600, 3725, 3745, as well as 7200 router platforms. GNS3 is older network emulator which allows the combination of virtual and real devices, used to simulate complex networks.

• EVE-NG (https://www.eve-ng.net/) – This is the first clientless multivendor network emulation software that empowers network and security professionals with huge opportunities in the networking world.

Differentiating GNS3 vs Eve-NG vs VIRL :

While comparing GNS3 vs EVE-NG, we find that GNS3 is a free, open source community that has built a well documented piece of software. It does follow a traditional client/server application model, but the best part is that the server component is easy to configure, deploy and maintain. In case of EVE-NG, it comes in both free community edition and professional paid edition. One key setback with GNS3 is that you are required to source own network device software images in order to emulate. But it is not needed to be observed as a fault because bundling software images from Cisco IOS with GNS3 would turn out to be illegal. Similarly, EVE-NG also requires licensed access in order to get to the network device software images.

While comparing GNS3 vs Eve-NG vs VIRL on the grounds of operating as a specialized network emulator, we would find that only EVE-NG is the one which is a clientless network emulator performing virtually. On the other hand, both VIRL and GNS3 require you to first download and then install an independent application to manipulate the functioning of network devices on the server.
Both VIRL and GNS3 require a separate terminal application to function, EVE-NG only needs lightweight terminal application like PuTTY, in order to build and modify a network topology. The entire process can easily be accomplished via an HTML 5 web client and it can not only be used over desktop but also on various mobile devices too!

After analyzing above three product carefully i have chosen EVE-NG as a network emulator for my project