Finally, we have some information on CML that is a little bit more concrete, haven’t seen a logo for it, so I am still using the old VIRL one.
Head over to http://www.cisco.com/go/cml and you’ll find some tasty information about the Corporate edition. There is not any information about the consumer version as of yet, I don’t expect that much will differ, though!
CML requirements
We have a CML Excel Capability Calculator, and it looks like you’ll need a pretty beefy machine. To run (as an example) 15 IOSv routers and ten IOS XRv routers along with two small server images, then you are looking at a requirement of 21248Mb memory, or approx 21Gb.
As a break-down of the requirements, IOSv requires 512Mb, whilst CSR1000v and IOS XRv both require 3Gb. Cisco does obviously, tout their UCS C220 M3 blades, tricked out with 16 cores and 128Gb of memory along with EXSi (5.0, 5.1 or 5.5) as a host environment.
Clearly, this does not make the corporate edition a cheap prospect.
The host machine (running the GUI) needs a minimum of 2GB, and 1GB free disk space, Firefox or Chrome, Windows 7 or Windows 8, or for a MAC user then OSX 10.8 or 10.9, along with JRE 6 or 7, so not very taxing from that standpoint.
Anyway, to confirm some things we already knew it comes in the form of a separate GUI and server. It also ships with an IOS 15.4(2)T IOS XRv image, and a Linux server.
What does CML support?
Unsurprisingly hardware functions and Layer 2 technologies are not supported – so no Spanning-Tree, HA or anything that requires an ASIC! Do not fear though as CML does offer the ability to connect to real networks, and the list of supported technologies certainly outweighs the unsupported.
I want to order CML!
The product code for the base package is R-CML-CE-K9=. This includes the Cisco Modeling Labs 1.0 software and a total of 15 supported nodes.
Extra nodes can be bought in packs of 10, 50 and 100 through expansion packs.
You can also purchase the IOS-XRv Simulation Site VM License and CSR 1000V e-PAK (in standard, advanced or premium packages) and these extras are a yearly subscription.
Whoa, wait. You have to run the lab on your own hardware AND you have to pay for that? But why would anyone want this stuff for like 13k$ a year then there are at least two perfectly good free alternatives?
Because it's the corporate edition, therefore comes with a hefty price tag. Not all companies like or will allow free alternatives, they would rather pay for it because it has the Cisco name and the support of Cisco.
Can't CISCO make a USB Dongle with the ASIC on it, and sell that instead
and tie the CORP version to need that dongle, to do all the ASIC stuff?