Cisco Modeling Labs Free tier

Use Proxmox VE or VMware Workstation

Cisco Modeling Labs is an advanced network simulation tool that allows you to test and troubleshoot network architectures. Recently, Cisco has introduced a free tier allowing you to simulate up to five network nodes. This is great news for those preparing for Cisco certification exams to get hands-on practice.

To be honest Packet Tracer is more than enough for learning the material for the CCNA and most courses will provide Packet Tracer lab files. I tried to do a Cisco U course which provided a CML lab as a yaml file but when I imported it into CML it gave me errors as the free tier did not include some of the node definitions needed for the lab. So be aware of these limitations.

CML provides access to real Cisco IOS images as opposed to Packet Tracer which is a network simulator and offers a subset of commands.

More info: https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/s/packet-tracer-alternative-lab-solutions

There are some limitations with the free tier, the following video explains more on this.

Installation on Proxmox

Recently I have been playing around with Proxmox VE which is an open-source platform. It is a type 1 hypervisor which means it runs directly on the physical hardware of the host machine. They have direct access to the hardware , as opposed to type 2 which runs on top of an operating system and it allows for better performance.

I used an old computer on which to run Proxmox VE, to install Proxmox see:

You will need the iso as opposed to the ova file, see the following video on how to install CML on Proxmox VE.

Installation on VMware Workstation

I didn’t use this but it’s a good alternative if you don’t have a spare laptop or PC and want to use your primary device to host CML. This allows you to run Virtual Machines on top of your host OS and it is a type 2 hypervisor.