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An nameless commenter questioned this very suitable issue about my Internet routing safety lab:
What are the smallest components prerequisites to run the lab.
TL&DR: 2 GB RAM, 2 vCPU
Now for the far more precise answer (aka “it relies upon”).
The lab has nine routers. Every system wants amongst 256MB (Mikrotik) and 8GB (Cisco IOS XR) if you run them as virtual machines. Insert 2 GB for the host running method and the virtualization surroundings, and we’re immediately having into the 8GB – 16 GB ballpark. Also, you ought to expect every single community machine to use at least fifty percent a CPU core.
Luckily there is a different way: Linux containers. As a substitute of a total-blown digital machine, every single network machine receives one more copy of the Linux TCP/IP stack and will become just a established of isolated processes operating on top rated of a shared Linux kernel. There are four straightforward-to-get network-product-as-container implementations supported by netlab: Arista EOS, Cumulus Linux, FRR, and Nokia SR-Linux.
I ran the BGP lab with all 4 of them and obtained the subsequent printouts from the free of charge command immediately after the lab was begun and configured. The applicable column is the used column the place you should subtract 1GB (the idle system memory utilization) to get the memory eaten by the lab containers.
Idle process (no lab is running)
$ totally free -h
complete utilised free of charge shared buff/cache obtainable
Mem: 62Gi 1.0Gi 16Gi 19Mi 44Gi 60Gi
Swap: 8.0Gi 0B 8.0Gi
Arista cEOS
$ cost-free -h
complete made use of no cost shared buff/cache accessible
Mem: 62Gi 11Gi 4.8Gi 961Mi 45Gi 48Gi
Swap: 8.0Gi 0B 8.0Gi
Cumulus Linux 4.x container (unofficial image by Michael Kashin)
cost-free -h
whole made use of no cost shared buff/cache readily available
Mem: 62Gi 2.6Gi 11Gi 468Mi 47Gi 58Gi
Swap: 8.0Gi 0B 8.0Gi
FRR containers
$ no cost -h
whole applied free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 62Gi 1.2Gi 16Gi 20Mi 44Gi 59Gi
Swap: 8.0Gi 0B 8.0Gi
Nokia SR Linux
$ totally free -h
whole employed free of charge shared buff/cache offered
Mem: 62Gi 12Gi 2.0Gi 29Mi 47Gi 48Gi
Swap: 8.0Gi 0B 8.0Gi
As you can see, you can decide on concerning two light-weight implementations (Cumulus and FRR) and two major hitters (Arista cEOS and Nokia SR Linux). Pointless to say, Arista and Nokia have much better configuration abilities and guidance much more characteristics than Cumulus or FRR, but that doesn’t issue if you’re interested in BGP routing and some very simple ingress/egress filters.
It would be an exciting exercising to consider to operate community gadget containers and containerlab on Home windows or MacOS laptop computer, but you never have to: make a Ubuntu VM with 2GB or 4GB of RAM and a several virtual CPU cores, install netlab and containerlab on it, and you’re great to go.
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