Note: I’m playing with themes right now. I don’t particularly like the one I’m on today, except code blocks look better and it reads nicer on phones. We’ll see if I can tweak the CSS to get it where I want it, or will need to switch themes again.

The nice thing about being an individual contributor again, and not being allowed to travel to Cisco Live in Amsterdam, is that I can spend more time in the lab. I acquired a UCS (actually DN appliance) server, for some new projects. It had a bunch of 2TB drives, and being a lab server I just threw them all in a RAID 0 for 12 TB. Simple. Next, getting a hypervisor up and running.

I’ve used ESXi for years, but it’s gotten a bit tiresome. The licensing is expensive and complex. For internal Cisco users, we need to go through a lot of hoops to get a license. So I decided to try ProxMox instead. It’s free, I don’t need to muck around with licenses, and so far, it seems to behave basically like ESXi. I had a little trouble finding a thing or two, but ChatGPT was quite helpful.

I’m setting up a GNS3 instance, on which I hope to install SONIC. The docs for doing SONIC on GNS3 say that you should install it on Windows, but I’m not convinced this is the case. I’m probably wrong and will find out. The SONIC image is 24 GB (!) so I had to make sure to account for that.

Anyways, the ProxMox install was a breeze. Just mounted the ISO via CIMC and away I went. My only complaint is that every time I log in to the browser, it asks me to buy a subscription. But this is not needed for day-to-day operation, just for updates.

So far, I’d recommend ProxMox enthusiastically. We’ll see if it holds up.