For the past years I have been using EVE-NG for most of my labs. It’s been a pleasure, but I’ve always felt like something was missing when it comes to simplicity and time it takes to resolve issues from time to time. As version 2.8 of Cisco Modeling Labs (CML) featured a new free tier, I tried it and was hooked. Even though it did not bring a lot of new things to the table, it was a whole lot easier deploying and operating.
During yesterdays cyber monday sale at Cisco Learning Network Store I made a decision and bought the “Personal Plus” license. I just could not resist it at 40% off and as I am approaching more demanding studies in my CCIE EI journey, it felt like a good investment. As the free tier, it was super easy to install even tough I had some troubles in mounting and getting the files from one of the refplat ISOs the natural way via cdrom on my hypervisor. Lucky for me, transferring the file using SCP to the VM was an alternative and worked as smooth as a normal cdrom mount.
Looking forward to diving deeper in to the world of CML and connecting nodes to external services in my lab environment, such as DNAC and ISE. This will for sure be a game changer in doing larger mock labs for the CCIE.
If you have not tried CML yet, you can sign up here for the free tier, which has a 5 node limit but still allows for plenty of labbing.