Sunday, February 1, 2009

Cisco IOS under Solaris

See anything strange below?


%SYS-5-RELOAD: Reload requested by console. Reload Reason: Reload command.
unix_reload()

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cisco Systems, Inc.
170 West Tasman Drive
San Jose, California 95134-1706



Cisco IOS Software, Solaris Software (UNIX-P-M), Experimental Version 12.2(20080714:162947) [arvinder-ss_auto_nightly 147]
Copyright (c) 1986-2008 by Cisco Systems, Inc.
Compiled Wed 24-Sep-08 12:28 by arvinder
Image text-base: 0x00011D98, data-base: 0x022F2008

Solaris Unix (Sparc) processor with 56561K bytes of memory.
Processor board ID 122882152
4 Ethernet interfaces
16K bytes of NVRAM.



Press RETURN to get started!


*Mar 1 00:00:00.527: Bootstrap Emulator called with code 135
%SYS-5-RESTART: System restarted --
Cisco IOS Software, Solaris Software (UNIX-P-M), Experimental Version 12.2(20080714:162947) [arvinder-ss_auto_nightly 147]
Copyright (c) 1986-2008 by Cisco Systems, Inc.
Compiled Wed 24-Sep-08 12:28 by arvinder


Router#sh ver
Cisco IOS Software, Solaris Software (UNIX-P-M), Experimental Version 12.2(20080714:162947) [arvinder-ss_auto_nightly 147]
Copyright (c) 1986-2008 by Cisco Systems, Inc.
Compiled Wed 24-Sep-08 12:28 by arvinder

ROM: Bootstrap program is Solaris

Router uptime is 43 minutes
System returned to ROM by reload at 0
System restarted at XXX
System image file is "unix:./.image"

Solaris Unix (Sparc) processor with 56561K bytes of memory.
Processor board ID 122882144
4 Ethernet interfaces
16K bytes of NVRAM.

Configuration register is 0x0


Although the Cisco IOU (IOS-on-Unix) simulator is quite old, i hope some time in the future it will be provided to customers too (i guess it started being used internally by tac people to simulate customer scenarios and now it's being used for various "internal" labs too). It also seems a much better alternative than the one that's included in the various written exam simulation labs. You will be surprised of the features that it supports (with a little bit of refinement it could even be used instead of the actual CCIE labs)! It runs special IOS images (depending on what features you need to test), so it's not a hardware emulator like dynamips (this has the advantage that it's less cpu intensive).

I still don't know if there is any relationship with this.

PS : Some years ago, there was a rumor that Cisco employees would get in trouble for even mentioning its existence and certainly if they ever gave access to somebody (only a very small number of Cisco employees had access to it). Nowadays, that it's used widely internally, i hope the above rumor has ceased to exist.

Please do not ask here for information where to get it. Just talk to your AM/SE.

21 comments:

  1. its also used for debugging on the developer side. if the bug is in IOU they know it isn't a platform specific bug and it makes it easier to test a whole lot of things without tying up a testbed

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi,

    Considering the "Cisco opening up IOS" link. I think the marketing name of this is AXP and not IOU or related OS stuff. Don't you think?

    Lucky mode: "I have used IOU :)"

    Best regards

    ReplyDelete
  3. @Francois, i'm a little bit familiar with AXP, that's why i was wondering about the link. You're probably right.

    It's all this "move software onto a Unix-based kernel" that makes things so blurry.

    ReplyDelete
  4. At networkers the labs were IOU based.

    ReplyDelete
  5. WebIOU was used there too. Also, i had some free time while doing labs and did some experimenting with PAGENT (another great tool).

    ReplyDelete
  6. CCIE SP Lab was IOU based and IOS version for 7600 was compiled for that lab. BUT IOU can't emulate line cards ASICs, so there no L2 emulation at all! No QOS and switching functionality.

    ReplyDelete
  7. @Oleg, I have done EVCs on IOU and they worked fine. But i guess that L2 is something completely different.
    Also, for creating QoS-viable environments, PAGENT was used.

    ReplyDelete
  8. @Tassos, we meet each other last day,do you remember guy from Georgia? ;)

    By the way Bruce Pincky had run 12 7600 routers on T60 with 2GB RAM. But he wasn't able to test any STP\QinQ and other L2 technologies. Additionally IOU can emulate only Ethernet interfaces.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Ok, now i remembered you ;)

    It's nice to know that i can have 12 7600s on my laptop.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Tassos,

    Can you install and configure IOU on T60? I can't configure and test VPLS on dynamips due to Cisco 7200 don't support it. I want to test many feature on Cisco 7600 but can't do it.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Sorry for my above post. My CCIE number is 17451.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Pipatpong, you need to get the IOU software first. After that, you can probably do a lot of stuff (although i don't know if support for VPLS is in there).

    ReplyDelete
  13. How do I get IOU software ? I heard from my friend (Cisco SE) that it need to run on Sun Workstation and it can run all IOS, IOS-XE.

    ReplyDelete
  14. You can always talk to your Account Team, but i don't believe you can get it (easily).

    ReplyDelete
  15. Hi,

    Few week's ago I have seen IOU demonstration on local Cisco office, could you please be more specific how to get it, half of things I use on my job I can't test on GNS actualy I found you blog when I was searching for some solution with EVC...

    Thanks,
    Vedran

    ReplyDelete
  16. Vedran, i cannot help you more, because i don't have all the details. Even my own Account Team is incommunicative regarding this matter.

    ReplyDelete
  17. I got imperssion that you have this sw on your PC :), anyway thanks,

    Vedran

    ReplyDelete
  18. This is being tested to replace the current 3.0 (and future 4.0) CCIE labs. It may be implemented a year from now. Also talks of directly competing against Dynamips and GNS3.

    ReplyDelete
  19. Anonymous, there were some limitations in the version i tried back then, so Dynamips/GNS3 has better support since it has full feature support (although it's much slower).

    ReplyDelete
  20. IOU live baby

    ReplyDelete
  21. try this guys - http://twopacket.zymichost.com/2012/03/12/integrating-gns3-with-qemu-emulated-sparc-solaris.html

    ReplyDelete

 
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