I have always wanted my CCNA certificate. I have been able to learn most of the information in the CCNA over the last 2 decades of work in the IT industry. Now, with the economy in the state it is and jobs hard to come by I feel its time to bolster my resume and stay current. I started my CCNA cert training 15 years ago, but due to life I was not able to complete it. I used GNS3 at the time to plan and simulate large networks when I could only afford a few pieces of real Cisco gear.  Now I want to run it on my Synology NAS so I can access it when need it.

I run a Synology NAS ds3018xs which is an older unit with an Intel Pentium D1508 clocked at 2.2ghz with a 2.6ghz Turbo Boost. The OS is DSM 7.3.1. This won’t allow me to simulate large networks, but I will be able to do a bit of study without a large purchase of gear. The Synology Virtual Machine Manager is their native virtual machine app. According to Synology’s knowledge base (https://kb.synology.com/en-global/DSM/help/Virtualization/image?version=7) it supports a large variety of virtual disk types:

To download the the gns3 virtual machine here.

I chose the VM Ware workstation, the VM disk is in .ova format.

Steps:

In the Virtual Machine Manager in DSM.

Select the Drop Down under “Create”

Select “Import”

In the new pop us select “Import from OVA files”

Select the location of the file in the browser and click next.

You will see a progress window appear as the system imports the virtual disk settings.

A window will then appear with the VM storage pool options. My VMs are stored on a RAID 1 mirror comprising of 2 1TB enterprise SSDs. Click next.

he next screen gives options for the virtual machine such as number of virtual cpus and ram. The gns3 system requirements for running it in a virtual machine are not expressly listed, however on the community forums users report minimum of 16gb RAM depending on number of virtual devices. Some images require 512mb of ram each device to run it virtually. Others run it with 2gb of RAM. I chose 8gb to start. I chose to use the PC machine type since the gns3 virtual disk is IDE .

The next step sets up the virtual machine drives themselves. My Synology showed in the tooltip that the size of the drives is determined by the import settings.

I chose the default options for the network settings. These can be changed later to suit your environment.

I left the final options the default.

The next screen allows you to choose the user that controls the power management of the VM. My user list redacted for security.

The summary screen. I selected the box for “Power on the Virtual Machine after creation”

Now the system will complete the import with progress

If you chose to Power on the VM after creation, select the “connect” button to connect to the virtual machine. Otherwise start the VM and then connect once it has booted. The information on how to connect to the system remotely or by ssh is provided on the initial splash page when connecting to the VM.

Navigate to the web ui URL shown on the splash page and you should see the gns3 main screen.

Now you are ready to make a new project.