Free Juniper Virtual QFX 10000 Switch. No time limit.

ScottC

So Juniper has a free virtual firewall and a virtual router to learn Juniper and to deploy in production environments. But what about learning our Data Center switches?

Well now there’s the vQFX1000 virtual data center switch. It’s a free, virtual version of Juniper’s top of the line QFX 10000 data center switch for testing, learning, and demo purposes. Currently, is it packaged for Vagrant and Ravello virtual environment tools. These are great, free tools developers like to use. The support for Vagrant is limited to Oracle’s Virtual Box for the moment.

Support for Vagrant will be extended to VMWare and KVM hypervisors in the future.

The link download link is below.

QFX10000 virtual version

Also, here’s an older, dated posting related to quickly setting up a Virtualbox/vagrant/Ansible environment and kicking the tires on this. You can download the software either from the official Juniper link above or from the github source link below.

Juniper vQFX setup using vagrant

 

 

 

 

Create great junos labs with Logical System and Tunnels. Works in vMX too!

ScottC

Here’s a great article from 2012 on Junos logical systems and logical tunnel interfaces. MX routers support 15 logical systems per router and when you combine this with logical tunnel interfaces, you can make extremely complex lab networks with one or more MX routers. Here’s the article below along with some additional information about logical tunnel interfaces.

JUNOS Logical-System: A Great Way To Learn Junos & Prepare For Certification

Configuring Logical Tunnel Interfaces

Also, you don’t have an MX router laying around? No problem! This is fully supported on Juniper’s vMX.

Below is an example to enable tunnel services within a vMX router.

chassis {

    fpc 0 {

        pic 0 {

            tunnel-services {

                bandwidth 10g;

            }

            interface-type ge;          

            number-of-ports 8;

        }

        lite-mode;

    }

    network-services enhanced-ip;

}

Here’s an example topology I created with logical systems and logical tunnel interfaces between the logical systems. In this example, there are two vMX routers with five logical systems each. This is like having ten routers total. Within the MXs, the logical systems are interconnected via logical tunnel interfaces which saves the ge interfaces for just interconnecting the vMXs together. That’s important due to the current limitation of 8 useable revenue interfaces on vMX routers.

 

Have fun making great labs with this!