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Cisco CSR1000V vs the Fabled IOU

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Posted on December 28, 2013 by John Herbert in Cisco, Networking // 2 Comments
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While I love hardware, I really dont like the space it takes up in my house, nor the noise it
makes (rather ironic given the noise levels emanating from my network closet, but still). To
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that end Im a big fan of solutions like GNS3 that allow me to virtualize my environment and
build out simulations without needing to fumble with a bunch of Cat5 cables to build my
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desired connectivity.

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And so I really enjoyed when today Jeff Fry published a post called Cisco CSR1000V Home Lab
Setup and Configuration. This is a great post (please do click through and read it) explaining
how to get, and install, some instances of the Cisco Cloud Services Router (CSR1000V).
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I was a little surprised though because last time I checked out the CSR1000V it simply didnt Log in
look like something practical to run at home. So what changed? Entries RSS
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System Requirements
Last time I checked the CSR1000V requirements, this is what they were:

As you can imagine, with a requirement for 4 vCPUs, my reaction was that this was absolutely
not something I would want to deploy at home as its just not scalable to have more than one
VM running like that. At least, in my environment I dont have CPUs to throw at stuff just for
fun. Then I considered how much this was likely to cost as well, so I noted the product and put
it our of my mind as something I could run.

The decision to shelve the CSR1000v as a home use product turns out to have been somewhat
hasty as in the next release (3.10), the requirements were reduced:

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And 3.11 continued the same way:

Thats a bit more like it. Instead of four vCPUs I now only need one vCPU, and the RAM
requirement has gone down to 2.5GB. That I can handle much more easily, and in fact I can run
a few of those at the same time without killing my VMware server.

The CSR1000V
The CSR1000v runs IOS XE and specifically, it runs one instance per VM.

CSR1#shver
CiscoIOSXESoftware,Version03.11.00.SStandardSupportRelease
CiscoIOSSoftware,CSR1000VSoftware(X86_64_LINUX_IOSDUNIVERSALK9M),
Version15.4(1)S,RELEASESOFTWARE(fc2)
TechnicalSupport:http://www.cisco.com/techsupport
Copyright(c)19862013byCiscoSystems,Inc.
CompiledTue19Nov1321:00bymcpre

Thats not a terribly onerous requirement by any means, but it does mean that for each router
I want to run, I need to have 1 vCPU and 2.5GB of RAM. In particular, that seems like an awful
lot of memory to soak up, especially when you think back to how little RAM Cisco routers have
typically come with over the years.

Licensing

To my surprise, just as Jeff said, I was able to download a copy of the CSR1000V OVA image
without anything other than accepting the licensing terms. Im not using it for business, just for
my lab, so its nice to be able to grab a copy like that. I keep wondering if thats a mistake, or if
they know that the 1 vCPU version is so powerless that it simply cant do anything useful on its
own, so its safe to download. I havent dug around much to find out; I was just pleased that I
could download it and install without having to hand over a fat wad of cash.

Home Lab

With the help of Jeffs excellent guide I was able to get three CSR1000V instances up and
running and talking to each other. Excellent but its only three hosts, and its a lot of resources
to eat up per host. Its almost like the CSR1000V is not optimized for lab use?

IOU
IOS On Unix (IOU) is an internal Cisco tool to simulate an IOS router or switching IOS. Its not
supposed to be available outside Cisco, so of course I wouldnt know anything about it, but IOU
does seems to be out there to some extent. Whats brilliant about IOU is that rather than

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needing a VM per router, each router is its own process; you want a new router, you run
another instance of the router code. Because IOU isnt actually emulating a router (like GNS3)
its incredibly CPU and memory efficient; idle time in IOS is idle time for the app, which means
idle time for the host operating system. What this means is that its possibly to run a large
number of router/switch instances on a single machine with quite limited resources. For
example, Ive seen a simulation with 30 devices running in under 2GB of RAM on a dual-core
mobile CPU. Thats pretty impressive to say the least. For the same rough specification of
compute resources you can either run one CSR1000V router instance or you could run 30
routers.

Licensing

This is the problem; you cant license IOU because its not supposed to be available outside
Cisco. I sincerely wish that Cisco would make IOU available for home lab use. Cripple
throughput if you need to, but please make it available to the public. This is such a hugely
valuable learning tool, I dont know why its not made available by Cisco.

Home Lab

Yeah. This would totally rock as a home lab, if it were available. Its resource-efficient and very
effective. Its not the easiest to configure connectivity between the simulated devices, but once
you get the hang of it, its not so bad. $100 and Id buy it in a heartbeat.

Alternatives
GNS3 rocks, but because it emulates the router hardware, its a lot tougher on CPU than IOU is.
On the other hand, you can still simulate a large number of devices with 2 CPUs and 2.5GB of
RAM (compared to CSR1000V).

Ciscos Packet Tracer is available to Network Academy students only. It serves a slightly
different purpose than other tools, and offers some interesting packet tracing capabilities, but
otherwise like IOU its not much use unless you have access to it.

Ciscos VIRL is scheduled to be launched shortly, and looks to be like Packet Tracer on the front
end with IOU (or something conceptually similar) on the back end. I gather it can simulate IOS
(using VIOS), Nexus (Titanium) and IOS-XR (XRVR). This is something Im really interested
in, and those who have seen it indicate that its looking really good, but whether its going to be
a viable home lab tool is going to come down to pricing.

Final Thoughts
Its worth playing with the CSR1000V just to try it, and Jeffs post is a great guide to setting it up.
Whether I keep those images running is another question; maybe Ill just spin up the VMs when
I need to run a simulation and then kill them off, because its a lot of resources to eat up. Or
maybe Ill just create a VM and hope I can run IOU on it some time. Either way, the chance to
try this out is not to be sniffed at, especially if you dont have access to alternative tools. Give it
a shot!

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2 Comments on Cisco CSR1000V vs the Fabled IOU

Jeremy // March 21, 2014 at 1:04 pm // Reply

Nice post. I am the creator of GNS3 and I just wanted to let you know that the new GNS3 will
support IOU, making it very easy to connect with classic IOS and other IOUs, VMs etc. Our first
alpha release is scheduled for next week. In the meantime in invite you to watch this video
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iZszsiKNR0) that shows what the IOU integration looks
like, please keep in mind the software is still in a early stage (alpha).

Enjoy!

John Herbert // March 21, 2014 at 2:01 pm // Reply

Exciting stuff! Thanks for the heads up on this. Id very much like to be able to use GNS3
with IOU, so that would be a huge win. Good luck with the release, and thanks again!

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