CCIE v5 INE Home Lab - Part 2 - Configuring CSR1000v on VMware ESXi and connecting Physical Switches

CCIE is not earned by completing the written and passing the lab, CCIE is earned in the 1000s of hours of lab, the 3am wake ups, and the countless of hours of studying ... that's what makes you a CCIE. While you are on this journey you are going to go through a transformation, and you will start to see things differently, you will start to troubleshoot differently, you will start to perceive situations differently and simply put ... you just become one of the best at your craft .... with that being said ....

In part 2 of this series, we will configure 10 CSR routers, and connect it to the virtual switch that we created in Part 1. Unlike many other tutorials on the Internet that demonstrates how to get serial over network to console into the routers, I am going to take a different approach on how to console into the routers. Main reason is that serial over network is only available for either 60 days as a demo or you have to get the enterprise license which is over $2000.

I normally would do it for free but I have had tons of requests and questions regarding the lab setup and scripts. So for a nominal fee I will configure your entire VMWare ESXi server / all the routers / the Linux VMs / auto loading scripts. More importantly it includes an easy to use WEB GUI to load the config files. Contact me via arwinr@gmail.com if you are interested. 

Screenshot of the WEB GUI. 

Understanding OSPF - Forward Metric in E2 Routes

In this blogtorial we are going to look into a minor detail regarding OSPF E2 routes that most literature happen to leave out and that is the Forward Metric of E2 routes. Cisco NX-OS and Arista EOS don't even show this Forward Metric in their output of show commands. As you are probably studying for your CCNA or CCNP you are told that the main difference between OSPF E2 vs E1 routes is that E1 takes into consideration the costs of each hop to reach the ASBR while E2 metric is by default 20. What if I told you that routers do consider cost of the path to the ASBR even for E2 routes with a default metric of 20? Before you get fooled into believing otherwise, take a look at the topology below.

As a side note the metric of redistributed E2 routes varies by platform, for example it is 1 in Arista.

Simple topology below ...

CCIE v5 INE Home Lab - Part 1 - Configuring VMware ESXi

"Every day you wake up you have two options, you can either look at the clock at 3:30am, tap the snooze button, go back to sleep, and dream about being a CCIE or you can tap into that whisper inside you telling you to get up and go pursue your dream about being a CCIE" .... with that being said ....

I've spent numerous hours exploring many different options on setting up the CCIE v5 hybrid (physical/virtual) home lab and I've finally settled on VMware ESXi. Although, you have many other options like Linux/KVM/VirtualBox, this method was the easiest for me. I am going to break this topic "CCIE v5 INE Home Lab" into a 3 part series blogtorial. If you follow the series step by step, you will end up with a complete home lab with everything you need to do the INE labs.

Here is an overview of the entire series and how it will be split up.

Part 1 - How to install and configure VMware ESXi Hypervisor and vSwitch? 

Part 2 - How to get virtual routers installed and physical switches connected?  

Part 3 - Script to automate the loading of initial router configs.

I normally would do it for free but I have had tons of requests and questions regarding the lab setup and scripts. So for a nominal fee I will configure your entire VMWare ESXi server / all the routers / the Linux VMs / auto loading scripts. More importantly it includes an easy to use WEB GUI to load the config files. Contact me via arwinr@gmail.com if you are interested. 

Screenshot of the WEB GUI. 

Note: Thomas Kjær pointed out in one of the comments below that ESXi version 6 recently released does not limit 4 serial per Linux VM. Therefore, instead of creating 4 linux VM you could just do it all in one Linux VM, but you would have to edit the scripts accordingly.