But what makes the kit do something special? The software. You could argue the point that when you buy a Cisco-branded product, it’s often a piece of hardware that arrives in a sturdy box, surrounded by foam and plastic, and featuring that new kit smell.
So you might have to use 4.Īnd finally under the Advanced settings tab make sure Activate CPU throttling is disabled and the the additional settings options says this exactly: -icount auto -hdachs 980,16,32 -vga -none -vnc noneĬlick OK and drag out your shiny new ASA 5520 appliance onto the GNS3 workspace.I think it’s fair to say that Cisco is a software company at heart. When I changed mine to 8 I noticed a lot of IRQ adapter conflicts. Under the Network tab, crank up the interfaces to 8 and make sure the adapter type is set to Intel Gigabit Ethernet (e1000).īy the way, if after creating the wizard you notice your ASA get’s stuck in a long reboot loop, try dropping the adapters from 8 to the default 4. Under the HDD tab, browse to the 512MB virtual flash drive you created earlier.
On my Mac I went browsed to the Qemu directory: cd /Applications/GNS3.app/Contents/Resources/qemu/binĪnd ran qemu-img to create a 512MB virtual solid state drive. Setting up the Quick Emulator (Qemu)īefore we can run the ASA in GNS3 1.3 we need to create the virtual hard drive where the ASA software will live. You can find an unpacked version of ASA 8.4.2 on Mediafire. In no way am I condoning software piracy so make sure you have a valid SMARTnet contract with Cisco before you download it. Then you can power down your real physical ASA, unpack the the images and play with them inside your GNS3 sandbox.įinally, the last option is to download the pre-unpacked ASA images and use them directly in GNS3. You can easily view the file names by typing dir at the console. Then type in the appropriate filename and enter the IP address of your TFTP server (your workstation IP). bin file directly.Īlternatively, you can setup a TFTP server on your workstation, plug it into the switchport of a real ASA 5520 and type: copy flash: tftp:
The most reliable way to get the image is to login to the download center with valid SMARTnet entitlements and download the.
I won’t go into the details of that here but there are several websites that show you how to do that. You’ll have to manually unpack the ASA 5.2 image before you can use it.
The answer is yes, you can and I’m about to show you how I did it on my Mac OS X 10.10 host using GNS3.Īfter downloading and installing GNS3 we need to get the ASA 5.2 image. Would it be nice if you could console into a virtual ASA 5520 running ASA 8.4.2? You could setup NAT, site-to-site VPNs with virtual hosts and go crazy with firewall rules.