Simulating Production network environment for testing

[DharmendraDeo7924]

Hi I'm Alex i have been recently employed as a network engineer for a leading telecommunication company in my region. I was requested to do network automation on the network, and it was a gigantic complex production network. My first instinct was to simulate the production on a local environment to run script tests before deploying onto production. This got me thinking, how could i even start recreating the whole production network that have almost 100+ network devices with existing configs?

[jbhoorasingh]

There are various products you can use to accomplish this. here is a list of ones I have tried

1. Cisco Modeling Lab - Create for scaling to large number of devices, but licensing can be costly. It was a tough sell to get the capital for this but it have really improved my confidence with my script. I deployed ~86 ios devices in my largest sim to date.... It was not worth it, my testing would still be valid if I scaled down the devices
2. Cisco VIRL - License restriction would restrict you to 20 nodes. It is the non-commercial version of CML. I use at home exclusively and I 20 nodes is plenty for testing automation/light weight networking apps
3. Eve-NG - Pretty decent product, almost switch for my home use, but I stayed to VIRL because the interface is similar to what I use at work. There is also a Pro version, but we don't what to deal with the legal license fiasco

Additionally we can look at GNS3 (client/server) set up. I have have bother with GNS3 anymore.