Assignment One

Application Review

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This report will review the feasibility and features of GNS3. An open source network design and simulation application that has been crowd sourced and actively backed by a community of users.

GNS3 is a crowd sourced project bringing full network modeling and simulation capabilities to the open source format. It allows low cost of entry for professionals to model and test their network configurations. Key features of the platform are its clean interface, ease of use and large community of networking professionals who are consistently collaborating to support GNS3.

GNS3 has the following positive points making it worth using in a professional setting to model network designs.

- It’s a fully functional network simulator. It accommodates the use of routers, firewalls, switches, bridges, clouds, hosts and wide range of protocols. Giving users the ability to produce models to a high level of detail.

- Clean, user friendly interface which make it simple to design with and easy to understand when viewing designs.

- Allows quick export of design to multiple image file formats (PNG, JPG, BMP, PDF).

There are however some negative points which take away from the application usefulness.

- Due to licensing issues, users must provide their own Cisco IOS image and IOU license to effectively use the application, as the images are integral to GNS3’s simulations.

- Although installation is simple, quite a few additional packages are required in order to use GNS3 (Winpcap, Wireshark, Dynamips, Qemu). Leading to bloat.

- Vendor specific. As GNS3 is an early project, it is not as fleshed out as other simulation applications. Its list of useable devices are mostly limited to Cisco products.

In conclusion, although GNS3 is a project with high potential, clean interface and strong community backing. It’s reliance on Cisco and requirement of a separate IOS image and license make in difficult to recommend.