UNetLab logo–There is a newer version of this post to be found —.UNetLab is an initiative by Andrea Dainese that’s meant to run the actual images of a Network Operating System (NOS), for example Cisco IOS or Juniper JunOS. UNetLab is an increasingly popular alternative to (Graphical Network Simulator) that provides comparable functionality, or for something like Cisco Packet Tracer (which simulates instead of emulates, and supports only Cisco devices). UNetLab works as a virtual machine on top of any hypervisor by VMware (including the free VMware Player). You just run and configure the VM, upload the NOS image you want to use and connect to the web interface to start building your lab. Let’s get to it. Running the virtual machineWe will be using the free VMware Player throughout this tutorial. You can also run UNetLab on an ESXi server if you have one available, which is actually the preferred method if you want to build bigger labs.
I think you can even do a bare metal install. I’ve heard from people that provide the VM with 16 GB of RAM. For smaller labs you can get away with 4 GB. I have 16 GB in my desktop so I will be providing 8 GB to my VM.
EVE - The Emulated Virtual Environment for network and security professionals. If your Labtop has connection to real Network so it's ok. If you need to connect to your Simulated Environment. So you will need to go for either - EVE-NG - GNS3. And both of GNS3 or EVE-NG will be hosted as VMs on either VMware workstation. Be ready and download the EVE-NG from the below link 😉.
The first step is to grab VMware Player from the VMware website and install it.When you have VMware Player ready to go, grab the most recent build available from the UNetLab website.I prefer the Google Drive option. At the moment of writing this, the version available for downloading is Unified Networking Lab-1.0.0-8.ova but we will be updating this later on to a more recent version.Run VMware Player and select Player - File - Open.
As we alredy know that EVE-NG or UNetLab VM is an Linux Ubuntu operating version. So If we know that.
VM settingsNow power on the VM and wait for it to present the shell. The default credentials are root:unl.
Once you log in you will be asked to do some basic setup including providing a new root password and some network settings. I just use DHCP in my own network. After providing the settings, the VM will reboot and provide a shell again. Log in with your new root password and test your network configuration.
Eve-ng Connect To Physical Network
The UNetLab VM does not support the ifconfig command anymore so you can use ip a. The adapter pnet0 should have picked up an IP address from your DHCP server if everything went right. Test your connection to internet and your DNS server by pinging a web server via a domain name. Setting up the VMIf everything went well, it’s time to do some household tasks in our fresh VM. First, we want to check the UNetLab version. If you use the command dpkg -l unetlab it will output some crap and the UNetLab version consistent with the filename of the OVA we downloaded.
UNL versionIf you want to run Cisco IOS images you need to setup UNetLab to handle the licensing right. There is a Python script on Github that really helps.
Assuming you are in the home directory of the root user (/root), run the following command. Note that your VM has an SSH server so you can connect to it using SSH and copy the commands: wget make the downloaded file executable and run it: chmod +x CiscoKeyGen.py./CiscoKeyGen.pyThe keygen gives the following output. License file outputI like to use a “cloud” interface inside my UNetLab environment. It’s visualized as a cloud icon in your lab topology and connects your lab to a separate virtual NIC. I connect this vNIC as a bridge to my LAN. This allows me to reach any device inside UNetLab that has an interface connected to the cloud icon and configured with an address inside my LAN. This opens up possibilities like running scripts that talk to the UNetLab environment or testing monitoring software, for example.To install an extra vNIC for the cloud interface, power off the VM.
I use the command poweroff. When the VM is powered off, open VMware Player again and go to the VM settings. Use the Add button to add another vNIC and make sure it’s configured in bridge mode. UNL network interfacesThe file /etc/network/interfaces should look like this (I had to add the bridgeageing 0 setting using the editor Vi): root@ltunl:# cat /etc/network/interfaces# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system# and how to activate them. Brctl showYou now have configuration for 10 network interfaces in place, which is the VMware Player limit. Two of those interfaces are up and running. Uploading imagesThe next step is to upload some software images that you want to use.
UNetLab supports multiple image formats, like dynamips, iou and qemu. I am not familiar with the recent progress of the GNS3 project, but images that used to run on GNS3 well a couple of years ago are dynamips images and they work in UNetLab too. Qemu is cool because you can convert a lot of different generic x86 virtual machines to a qemu image. A lot of vendors release x86 VM versions of their products, including examples like Fortinet’s FortiGate VM or Juniper’s vMX router. You can find a list of images that UNetLab supports.I use FileZilla to make an SFTP connection to the UNetLab VM.
SFTP is like FTP built into the SSH server. My settings look like this. SFTP settingsThe folder /opt/unetlab/addons contains three folders for each of the supported image formats. I use a qemu image named vios-adventerprisek9-m-15.4-1.3.0-181 so I create a directory with exactly that name under /opt/unetlab/addons/qemu.
In this directory I place my image file called hda.qcow2. I didn’t test it, but I think directory and file names are important here. After uploading images, run this command: /opt/unetlab/wrappers/unlwrapper -a fixpermissions Building a labWe are now ready to set up our client device and connect to the GUI. I used Windows and I don’t know about your options to run the GUI from other operating systems.
Eve-ng Connect To Real Network Esxi
We have to do a client integration. You can download the required file.
UNetLab uses two options to interface with your devices: telnet and VNC. Most people have Putty and UltraVNC installed for using UNetLab, I don’t know how other applications will react. The client integration file allows UNetLab to run the required applications by clicking on a running device in the topology. After the install, telnet via Putty should work. If you want to use VNC, you can find the required instructions on the UNetLab.com website.Point your browser to the IP address of your UNetLab VM.
Accept the policy and log in with the default credentials admin:unl. Click Actions - Add a new lab, then fill out the form. PingSo that’s it, you can build topologies and test your own stuff with this setup. I should mention that the developers of UNetLab have a new project coming up which is called Emulated Virtual Environment or EVE. One of the UNetLab developers, Uldis Dzerkals, has a donation page for the project online.
It includes a video where he explains all the cool new features. If you’d like more information about the UNetLab project and where these guys are coming from, you can check out the where both Andrea and Uldis are interviewed. Thanks for reading a Lab Time article and feel free to leave comments. Can you connect the unet lab with internet, i am running ubuntu, vmware workstation in it running unet lab.i have installed windows xp in unet lab but wants to connect this windows host to internet, so that i can install some useful software it.i have enabled the these bridge interface as you have show in your lab adding those lines in the /etc/network/interfaces file.in my virtual network editor, i have set the vmnet0, vmnet 1 adapters to bridge mode, one of them is bridged to wlan 0 and vmnet1 is connected to virbr0.Please help!!!Regards,Nitin Mohan.