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- So we finally have GNS3 up and running.
We've got it loaded, it's ready to go to start building
our virtual lab, so let's go ahead and get going with that.
So, in these next set of videos,
I'm gonna actually be combining several things at once.
I'm gonna be slowly building a lab, and at the same time,
I'm gonna be telling you a little bit about
what the various icons are and what the toolbars are
surrounding the outer periphery
or the outside of your GNS GUI.
So let's get started with that.
So let's go ahead and open up GNS3,
and like we saw previously, the first thing it's gonna do
is ask us to name this particular project.
And that's whatever you want.
You could even leave it as Untitled if you wish.
But I'm just gonna say Test CCNA...
I'll just say CCNA Project1.
There we go.
Okay, so let's talk a little bit about
what we are looking at here,
and what these various things are on the screen.
So, starting with this area right here,
this large white space.
Basically, we call this the workspace.
So, this is where your various routers and stuff
are gonna end up going, they're connected to each other,
and your switches and things like that,
and so this is where you're gonna create your topology,
is in the workspace.
Now, the next thing I wanna focus on
is this toolbar right here on the left.
This is called the Devices toolbar,
and from here, like it sounds,
you get to select the various devices that you want.
Now, the devices that are gonna be available here
are dependent on a couple of things.
Number one depends on what IOS software
you have put in here.
Now, at minimum, you should have something
in the router section.
I mean, even if you have just one flavor
of Cisco IOS software, it's gonna be router software,
because GNS3 doesn't support switching software,
it only supports router software.
So you'll have something in the router section.
So let's go ahead and open up this
and see what it looks like.
So if I go ahead and click on this,
it shows me that right now, I have a single router,
because, I should say, a single platform
of router available to me, because right now,
all I loaded in was a 3725
IOS image.
If for some reason I want more,
I would just go up to Edit, Preferences,
and then on my left section here under Dynamips,
I'd click on IOS routers, and I'd say New.
And then I would locate the new image I want to insert,
which in this case is stored in my hard drive.
Maybe I want a 7200 series IOS.
So I'd put that in there,
and you should always decompress it,
that way your routers will start much more quickly.
You could just leave the name the same,
and this is just like we talked about earlier.
Make sure the memory,
that actually is the appropriate amount of memory, 512 megs.
And that's one of the downsides of using the 7200 series,
they eat up a gob of memory.
You can see that just running two of those things
is gonna eat up one gig.
And then you populate your slots,
so I'll just put another couple of Fast Ethernets in there,
and I'll put a 8-Port serial card,
and that's all I'm gonna do for now.
And then select your Idle PC.
And this is all stuff that we saw earlier
in the previous videos.
All I'm doing right now is showing you what you need to do
if you wanna get another model of router available to you
in the Routers devices.
So this shouldn't take too long.
And there we go.
Now we have an Idle PC value that's been found.
So I can hit that and Finish.
And now when I hit Apply
and OK,
now if I go back to the Routers section,
I've got two different flavors of router.
Now, remember what I told you earlier,
that, ideally, when you create your topologies,
if you can, just stick with one flavor of router.
For example, in this particular topology here,
if I drop in a couple of
3725s,
and then maybe a 7200,
I'm now gonna be eating up a lot more memory.
Now, these routers right now are not turned on,
they're not powered on, but once they are turned on,
it's gonna consume more memory because
I'm gonna have a 7200 series image running
at the same time as a 3725 image.
Be a lot easier if I just get rid of my 7200,
and just keep my topology purely made of all the same model,
3725s, that will
consume less memory on my
laptop.
So you can see here, I've shown you basically,
here's the routers, you just basically
drag and drop them into your topology.
Now, one thing that's kind of nice about this,
as you've seen, I've been dragging them
individually one at a time.
A nice little sort of shortcut, 'cause I'm guessing
you're probably gonna wanna make a topology
that's more than one router is,
and what I'm doing here is I'm just right-clicking
on the router to get all of these various options.
Is when you drag your router in,
before you let go of your mouse,
on your keyboard, press your Shift key.
And then while you're pressing Shift, let go of your mouse.
And now it actually prompts you,
how many routers do you want to drop.
So instead of just dropping one,
if I know that my topology is gonna have five routers,
I can just put five here, and bam, there they are.
There's all five routers.
So that is the routers devices, or the Router nodes,
because, remember, everything on this section here
on the left is called a node.
And the next one down is the Switching nodes.
And you can see that here GNS3 by default
provides you an ATM switch.
Now, this is a real, basic ATM switch.
This is not running Cisco IOS.
But if you wanna drag and drop some routers here
that have some ATM interfaces,
well, you're gonna need an ATM switch to connect them.
And so here's a real easy way to do that.
You'll also have an Ethernet hub.
You have an Ethernet switch.
So these first three here,
these go by the name of built-in nodes,
because you don't need any special IOS for these,
they are built into GNS3 as built-in nodes.
And then the last one, also is a built-in node,
the Frame Relay switch.
That's also in there.
And I'll just go ahead and drop in,
for example, the Ethernet switch.
We'll talk more about switching later on,
but if I right-click that,
you can see there's no option in here
to open a command line, to open a console,
because there is no command line in this.
In this one, I would just hit Configure,
and, for example, here I could select, you know,
my particular interfaces
and whether I want them to be access ports,
802.1Q, what VLAN I want them to be in,
and so on and so forth.
And we'll get into more of that later on
when we get into the switching section.
Now, the one Switching node in here
that is not a built-in node is the EtherSwitch router.
This is here because, when I imported my 3725 IOS image,
I clicked on that little box that said,
this is an EtherSwitch router.
And that automatically told this router, hey,
you need to have the Ethernet switching module built in.
So this is a 3725, but it's got
that Ethernet switching module built in.
So if I wanna practice some actual Cisco IOS commands
that relate to switching, this is the guy
I would wanna drag and drop into my topology.
So those are your switches.
The next node down is your PC type node.
And you've actually got three of these.
So let me start with the bottom one.
The Virtual PC is most likely the one that you're gonna use
when you first get started with GNS3,
this is the one you're gonna use.
And like I mentioned in previous videos,
this Virtual PC here
allows you to, if I open up the console of this...
Actually, the console won't work right now
because it's not turned on, but if it was on,
I'd open up the console, it would let me start UDP streams,
TCP streams, and we'll get all into that
when I talk about how I actually use these PCs.
Now, you might be wondering to yourself,
well, what's the difference between this Virtual PC
and this other node I see up here called the Host node?
Well, they're actually extremely different from each other.
Actually, the Host node and the Cloud node
are exactly the same thing.
They're just two different representations for something,
and I'm not...
I'll talk more about this later,
but let me just give you a preview real quickly.
So we know that GNS3 is running
as an application inside of your laptop.
And, presumably, your laptop has some sort
of real network interface card, you know,
a wired Ethernet card, or at minimum, a Wi-Fi NIC.
Well, sometimes, you might have a desire
to actually connect your GNS3 virtual topology
to the real outside world.
And this is where you would use either the Cloud node
or the Host node to do that.
Both of them do the exact same thing,
when you use those, so, for example,
if I bring in the Cloud node here,
one of the things I would have to do with this,
I'm not gonna go into the details right now,
but when you right-click on that,
one of the things you would do is within that Cloud node,
you would tell it what network interface card I wanna use,
like in my particular laptop,
I have both a wired Ethernet and a Wi-Fi NIC.
So I could select one of those.
I could go into that Cloud node and say, okay,
cloud, you're actually gonna connect
to my wired Ethernet NIC card.
And then if I connect one of those routers
to that cloud, guess what?
That router now actually has access to
whatever is connected to my wired NIC.
So if my wired NIC is connected to a real physical switch
sitting on a desk right next to me,
or a real physical router on a desk right next to me,
that physical device will now be able to talk to
my virtual router, my emulated router,
because they're both connected via this cloud.
And the cloud is that node that actually connects
the virtual topology with my actual physical NIC card.
The cloud could also connect to your Wi-Fi NIC card as well.
Now, you might be wondering, well,
if Cloud and the Host node are both exactly the same thing,
why would I use one or the other, what's the difference?
It really is just for you to keep your topology
sort of in your mind.
For example,
let's say that,
connected to my laptop,
connected to my Ethernet cable right here on my laptop,
I actually had a real, physical Windows server right here,
running, like, you know, a Windows R8 server,
a Windows 2000 server, or something like that.
Because I was gonna use that server for doing
AAA, maybe I want it to be a RADIUS server.
Maybe I wanna configure it as a domain server, or as a...
You know, install Apache on there, so I could browse to it,
or somethin' like that.
And I wanna connect my GNS3 virtual topology
to that one physical server.
Well, in my topology, it would probably make more sense,
then, for me to connect my router to the host,
because, after all, my physical laptop,
the cable is connecting to one thing,
a host device, one physical server.
I could just as easily have used the cloud icon as well,
because they both do the same thing.
But where I would probably use the cloud is,
you know, as you get more advanced
with some of your switching labs,
especially when you get to the CCNP level,
you'll realize that a lot of the switching commands
that you'd need to know for the CCNP and for the CCIE
unfortunately require either a real physical switch
or L2IOU,
and even L2IOU
doesn't have all the commands
that real physical switches do.
So for a lot of that stuff,
you're gonna need a real physical switch.
So, let's say I had a little rack here.
Let's say I had three physical switches
that I purchased from Cisco or from eBay or from some place,
three physical switches, and I wanna connect
those three physical switches into my GNS3 topology.
Well, once again, I would have to connect one of them
physically to the NIC card on my laptop,
and then I would probably use the Cloud node,
because, in this particular case,
just to think of it in my mind,
well, my GNS3 environment's
not really just connecting to one thing,
it's connecting to three things, three switches,
so it makes more sense for me to use the cloud.
But, really, they both do exactly the same thing.
They're built-in nodes that allow you
to connect your GNS3 environment
to something physically connected to your laptop.
And that's it.
So that's what they are.
So let's go ahead and get rid of those for a moment.
Delete,
and delete.
And then, if we keep on going down,
this one here, I don't have anything in this.
So this one says Security Devices.
So this is for more advanced users.
In order to do security devices,
now I'd have to have some virtual machines and stuff
in order to do like a Cisco ASA
or a PIX or something like that.
But, in my case, I don't have any of that kind of stuff,
so there's nothing showing up here.
And then this fifth one down basically shows you everything.
So, actually, you can just click on that,
and it'll show you everything you have,
if you just wanna get a view of all the nodes.
The last one is actually not displaying any node.
This last one, if you can see it
as I hover my mouse over it, it says Add a link.
If I click on that, that's actually what I use
to add links between my devices.
So, for example, let me go ahead and unclick it,
let's say I want to connect these routers together,
and let's say I wanted to connect R1 and R2 via Ethernet.
So I click my Link tool,
and now, notice that my cursor
turns into a, like a plus sign, sort of like a...
I don't even know how to describe that.
But, basically, you just click on one of your devices
like my router, and now it shows me
all the interfaces in that router.
So, I say, all right, well, I wanna select FastEthernet0/0,
and now I'm creating a link,
I go up and click the other router,
and I wanna connect him to FastEthernet0/0.
So now I have just created a link between these two routers.
Oh, between router two and router four,
I wanna connect them via serial, so I click on him.
Serial 2/0 connecting to Serial 2/0.
And as long as this link is selected,
notice it's got the little sort of stop sign there,
as long as that's depressed,
any time I click on a device, it'll allow me to
connect links from that device to another device.
And then once, I'm done,
I just go back to the Link button again,
press it, and deselect it.
So that's, just to recap this section,
and then I'm gonna wrap up this video,
so far what we've talked about is the workspace,
and this is where I'm actually gonna
start working with my devices,
this is where you drag and drop everything,
and this is where you form your topology,
and if I saved my project,
right now, I'll just go ahead and do that,
File, Save Project,
and remember what I named it, CCNA Project1?
Well, now, if I go into my folder
where my projects are located, let's go ahead and do that,
C: Drive,
Users,
my name,
GNS3,
Projects,
and there it is, CCNA Project1,
if I double-click that, here's the latest screenshot.
So there's the PNG image of what I've created so far.
Now, notice, what if I, let's go ahead and go back to this,
what if I move this around a little bit, like that?
Okay, is that automatically gonna update that PNG image?
Well, let's refresh this.
Refresh, open it up,
nope, it didn't.
So this PNG is only gonna be updated
if I go to File, Save Project.
Then it will take a new image of
whatever this is currently looking at in the workspace.
So we've talked about the workspace,
and we've talked about the Device toolbar,
and what each of these buttons
on the Device toolbar represent.
So, in the next video, I'm gonna go into
some of these other areas of the GNS3 application
and the various different parts of the screen,
and we'll talk about what they mean.
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