Unetlab – Setting up vIOS and ASAs

Stuart Fordham

12 years ago

More fun with UnetLab today!

I am back to running it on the ESXi server, so have plenty of memory and CPU cores. It should be nice and fast!

Yesterday was fun, I added IOL images and XRv, so today let’s add vIOS, and, if I can, an ASA!

vIOS on UnetLab

I am going to try and get the vIOS images from the OnePK (all in one image) running. Andrea already has a guide to this, so it shouldn’t be too hard. The original documentation is here.

Firstly you can see the amount of space I have free, I then copy (using FileZilla) the OVA file onto the VM, and again you can see the space taken up. I then follow Andrea’s steps (though I did play with the folder name…)

Following the documentation through (or so I thought), I then created a lab, added a network, and tried to add a vIOS node.

But the list was empty.

So, I read through the doc again, and some of the comments. Andrea tells us what the image name should be, so I created a folder to match the version, and moved the HDA file into there:

Now we are good!

Topology

The topology looks like this:

So let’s try configuring the routers!

Router(config)#ho vIOS-1
vIOS-1(config)#int gi 0/0
vIOS-1(config-if)#ip add 10.1.1.1 255.255.255.0
vIOS-1(config-if)#no shut
vIOS-1(config-if)#cdp enable 
vIOS-1(config-if)#exit
vIOS-1(config)#cdp run 
vIOS-1(config)#exit
vIOS-1#sh ip int bri
Interface              IP-Address      OK? Method Status                Protocol
GigabitEthernet0/0     10.1.1.1        YES manual up                    up      
GigabitEthernet0/1     unassigned      YES unset  administratively down down    
GigabitEthernet0/2     unassigned      YES unset  administratively down down    
GigabitEthernet0/3     unassigned      YES unset  administratively down down    
vIOS-1#

Router(config)#ho vIOS-2
vIOS-2(config)#int gi 0/0
vIOS-2(config-if)#ip add 10.1.1.2 255.255.255.0
vIOS-2(config-if)#no shut
vIOS-2(config-if)#cdp en 
vIOS-2(config-if)#exit
vIOS-2(config)#cdp run
vIOS-2(config)#exit
vIOS-2#s
Interface              IP-Address      OK? Method Status                Protocol
GigabitEthernet0/0     10.1.1.2        YES manual up                    up      
GigabitEthernet0/1     unassigned      YES unset  administratively down down    
GigabitEthernet0/2     unassigned      YES unset  administratively down down    
GigabitEthernet0/3     unassigned      YES unset  administratively down down    
vIOS-2#sh cdp neigh
Capability Codes: R - Router, T - Trans Bridge, B - Source Route Bridge
                  S - Switch, H - Host, I - IGMP, r - Repeater, P - Phone, 
                  D - Remote, C - CVTA, M - Two-port Mac Relay 

Device ID        Local Intrfce     Holdtme    Capability  Platform  Port ID
vIOS-1           Gig 0/0           150              R B   IOSv      Gig 0/0

Total cdp entries displayed : 1
vIOS-2#ping 10.1.1.1
Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 10.1.1.1, timeout is 2 seconds:
.!!!!
Success rate is 80 percent (4/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 1/5/12 ms
vIOS-2#

Easy.

I took the first screenshot at 13:22, it’s now 13:58, and I have written this whilst setting it all up. 30 minutes or less!

ASA on UNetLab

Not sure how this will go. There isn’t a guide for it, so It’s going to be a lot of guess work!

I start by copying the two VMDK files I have to the /tmp directory:

root@iou:/# ls /tmp
ASA-8.42-1.vmdk  ASA-8.42.vmdk
root@iou:/#

Then I convert them:

root@iou:/tmp# qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O qcow2 ASA-8.42.vmdk hda.qcow2
root@iou:/tmp# qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O qcow2 ASA-8.42-1.vmdk hdb.qcow2
root@iou:/tmp#

I then move to the right directory, and move the files there:

root@iou:/opt/unetlab/addons/qemu# mkdir ASA-8.42
root@iou:/opt/unetlab/addons/qemu# mv /tmp/hda.qcow2 ASA-8.42/
root@iou:/opt/unetlab/addons/qemu# mv /tmp/hdb.qcow2 ASA-8.42/
root@iou:/opt/unetlab/addons/qemu# /opt/unetlab/wrappers/unl_wrapper -a fixpermissions
root@iou:/opt/unetlab/addons/qemu#

Surprisingly… There is nothing there when I try and add a node:

At this point I started reading some of the other documents. I went through all of them until I got to the F5 BIG-IP document. Here we have another example of a 2 part system. I was happy that I had named the files hda and hdb, but then I thought – let’s just try making the folder name lower case. So I edited it in FileZilla:

root@iou:~# ls /opt/unetlab/addons/qemu/
asa-8.42  vios-adventerprisek9-m15.4-1.2.0-173  xrv-k9-5.2.2
root@iou:~#

All of a sudden, I have the option for ASAs!

So. let’s create a new lab and connect everything up!

This has all been a bit of a shot in the dark. Not knowing if I could get them running, I thought I would give it a go. But here is the thing…. are they usable?

There is a moment of wonder, as I sit staring at a blank telnet session, then suddenly…

Let’s just prove we can run them, and have connectivity between them:

ciscoasa(config)# hostname ASA1
ASA1(config)# int gi 0  
ASA1(config-if)# ip add 10.1.1.1 255.255.255.0
ASA1(config-if)# nameif Outside
INFO: Security level for "Outside" set to 0 by default.
ASA1(config-if)# 
ASA1(config-if)# no shut
ASA1(config-if)# 

ciscoasa(config)# hostname ASA2
ASA2(config)# int gi 0
ASA2(config-if)# ip add 10.1.1.2 255.255.255.0
ASA2(config-if)# no shut
ASA2(config-if)# nameif Outside
INFO: Security level for "Outside" set to 0 by default.
ASA2(config-if)#  

ASA1# ping 10.1.1.2
Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 10.1.1.2, timeout is 2 seconds:
!!!!!
Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 1/2/10 ms
ASA1# 

ASA2# ping 10.1.1.1
Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 10.1.1.1, timeout is 2 seconds:
!!!!!
Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 1/2/10 ms
ASA2#

Wow!

So, in two days, with a total of about three hours, I now have one environment that will run IOL routers, XRv routers, vIOS routers and ASAs.

Now that is impressive!

I might even try and add Titanium to UNetLab as well! But not today.