Lab On The Go
It seems like not too long ago that I had to jump through hoops just to be able to get some lab time in at work, or when I was otherwise away from my rack. My original routine for remote labbing was to leave the equipment I needed powered on with my laptop connected via console cable to my access server. I then setup port forwarding to my laptop so that I could RDP into it while I was at work.
This setup was inefficient for several reasons. The most obvious was the fact that I had to leave all of that equipment powered on for a full eight hours just so I might be able to get less than an hour of lab time. Another problem I ran into was that the connections between the equipment could not be reconfigured when I was not physically present.
My recent purchase of a Western Digital Passport external hard drive sent me on a quest for more portable apps to install onto it for remote use. It was then that I discovered GNS3 could be installed onto a flash drive or external hard drive (just about any removable media for that matter). The process was simple, during the installation of GNS3, you just set the installation directory of a folder on your removable media. The installation only requires about 40MB, so a minimal amount of space is required. From there you just copy the IOS images you need onto the flash drive and you are good to go!
It should be noted that GNS3 does WinPcap if you would like to bind some of your labs to the physical network card on the laptop. If you do not require this feature, then there are no other dependencies.
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