Introduce to Dynamips

Dynamips is the best Cisco emulator software created by Christophe Fillot.

Here's his declaration,

"I started in August 2005 a project to emulate a Cisco 7200 on a traditionnal PC. Now, it also supports Cisco 3600 series (3620, 3640 and 3660), 3700 series (3725, 3745) and 2600 series (2610 to 2650XM, 2691).

The goals of this emulator are mainly:

• To be used as a training platform, with software used in real world. It would allow people to become more familiar with Cisco devices, Cisco being the world leader in networking technologies ;
• Test and experiment the numerous and powerful features of Cisco IOS ;
• Check quickly configurations to be deployed later on real routers.

Of course, this emulator cannot replace a real router: you should be able to get a performance of about 1 kpps (depending on your host machine), to be compared to the 100 kpps delivered by a NPE-100 (the oldest NPE model). So, it is simply a complementary tool to real labs for administrators of Cisco networks or people wanting to pass their CCNA/CCNP/CCIE exams.

Current status

At this time, the emulator I have programmed is able to boot a large number of Cisco IOS releases available for the 7200, 3600, 3700 and 2600 platforms, including the latest 12.2S and 12.4T.

The following devices are emulated in the current release (0.2.7):

• MIPS64 and PowerPC CPU processors. The instruction sets are not completely emulated now (MIPS FPU support is lacking, TLB support is not finished and other minor things), but it is sufficient for IOS ;
• DRAM and Packet SRAM memory ;
• Non-Volatile Memory (NVRAM) ;
• Signetics SCN 2681 DUART (C7200 Console and AUX ports) ;
• National Semiconductors NS16552 DUART (C3600/C3700/C2600 Console and AUX ports) ;
• Dallas DS1620 Temperature Sensors and Voltage Sensors, allowing the C7200 Environmental Monitor to work properly ;
• NMC93C46 Serial EEPROM ;
• Bootflash of 8 Mb (Intel 28F016SA) ;
• Galileo GT64010/GT64120/GT96100 PCI controllers, DEC 21x50 PCI bridges and so ;
• PCMCIA ATA disk emulation (C7200 only at this time)."

Credit : http://www.ipflow.utc.fr/index.php/Cisco_7200_Simulator