The tutorial discuss the use of GNS3 software to run Cisco Virtual IOS (vIOS). Cisco vIOS is shipped and supported as a part of the Cisco's One Platform Kit that is distributed in form of virtual machine.It might be downloaded with Cisco.com account.
Referring to the above diagram, VMachine1HOST will be the host of ASA which we're going to simulate. I chose CentOS-5.4-x8664 for the VMachine1HOST. Any other linux OS should be ok. VMachine1HOST and VMachine2 (optional) actually guest OS, installed in VMware Worksation. Any other virtual machine software, e.g. VirtualBox, should be ok too.To inter-connect between VMware guest OS with GNS3 virtual network, we need to:.
Configure VMachine1HOST to use 'Host-only' network interface (vmnet1-7 & vmnet9). Both VMachine1HOST VMware guest OS and 'Cloud' need to configured to use same vmnet network interface. Same rule apply to VMachine2 VMware guest OS and it 'Cloud'.MaulanaSS 'Cloud' is to enable ASA to communicate with physical network.However, this simulation is not perfect because only 'one' side is connected to ASA. It should be two side connected to ASA which are 'inside' & 'outside' network. But, until ASA ver 8 can be fully simulated using GNS3, this is the closest simulation we can get.The next step is to get an initrd and a Linux kernel from your ASA image to use them with Qemu and also fix the initrd for our needs. The initrd is zipped and archived in the ASA image, asa802-k8.bin, we have to extract it.These steps need to be done at VMachine1HOST.
#!/bin/shFIRSTSTART=noif test! -e /mnt/disk0/linamonitorthen####################################### fdisk /dev/hda /asa/scripts/fdisk.inecho 'o' /asa/scripts/fdisk.inecho 'n' /asa/scripts/fdisk.inecho 'p' /asa/scripts/fdisk.inecho '1' /asa/scripts/fdisk.inecho $2 /asa/scripts/fdisk.inecho ' ' /asa/scripts/fdisk.inecho 't' /asa/scripts/fdisk.inecho '4' /asa/scripts/fdisk.inecho 'w' /asa/scripts/fdisk.in/bin/umount $MNT /dev/null 2 /dev/nullecho -n 'Initializing partition - '/sbin/fdisk $DEV /dev/null 2 /dev/nullecho 'done!' Chmod +x asa/script/firststart.sh12) In order for the script to be loaded at startup, edit etc/init.d/rcS and change /asa/bin/linamonitor with /asa/scripts/firststart.sh13) Now you can compress all the file and have the initrd ready to use in Qemu:find. cpio -o -H newc gzip -9. /asa802-k8.initrd.gzStarting ASA with QEMUMake sure these command executed in the same directory that contain ASA initrd, asa802-k8.initrd.gz,& kernel, asa802-k8.kernel.1) Create FLASH file (QEMU virtual hard disk).