CCIE v5 INE Home Lab - Part 3 - Console to Routers / Automating scripts

Don't you love it when it all comes together and all the puzzle pieces fall into place. Well I hope that this blogtorial does exactly that. In part 1 and part 2, we laid the groundwork and the foundation to successfully get a lab up and running and in this blogtorial we are going to finish it off with:

• How to console into the virtual routers? 
• How to get all initial configs prep'd so we can have concentrate on doing the labs rather than setting up the labs?
• How to automate the loading of the initial configs? 

I know it's a lot to cover in one post, but I also didn't want to breakup this series into too many parts. So without further adieu, let's get started and I will try to streamline it and post as much screenshots as possible. Here is the overview and where we will be spending most of the blogtorial.

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.