GNS3 Recommended hardware Specs and Minimum basic Requirements

GNS3 Recommended hardware Specs and basic Requirements

This article is about the hardware specification of GNS3, we will discuss the minimum hardware requirement and recommended hardware requirement for different scenarios. GNS3 the most popular network simulator use for simulating different virtual and real devices for creating the network labs. GNS3 base on Dynamips emulation software to simulating real IOS of Cisco. Since it is using the real router IOS of routers, therefore, its hardware requirement higher as compare to other network simulators. Also, GNS3's hardware requirements depend upon on the number of virtual devices you use in your Network Lab, therefore we discuss the different network scenarios and their hardware requirements according to different network engineers.

Minimum Hardware Requirements For Gns3:

As it is discussed earlier that there is no fixed minimum hardware requirement for GNS3 it depends on the number of virtual devices you use in your network topology. For minimum requirements suppose you want to create a network topology of three routers (2600 series) with GNS3 then following is the minimum hardware:

Processor= Pentium / Dual-core 2.0 (with virtualization feature)
RAM= 1 GB
OS= Windows 7 Service pack 1 or higher
For more routers and for creating the complex network labs in gns3 we define following chart for a minimum memory of single network device. when you use multiple network devices in your labs you can guess the minimum memory requirements with the following chart:

Minimun RAM for running single IOS/Router
2600 series IOS = 256MB
3700/3600 series IOS = 256 MB
7200 series IOS = 512 MB
VMware/VirtualBox Workstation= 512MB in case of XP
Tiny Care VM= 256MB (in case of older versions)
Qemu host=256MB

Idle PC value will help gns3 to consume fewer CPU resources. It’s specific to each different image or IOS.

Recommended Hardware Requirements For Gns3:

According to documentation and in view of different network engineers following is the recommended hardware requirements for simple network scenarios running with 5 to 6 routers. 

Processor= Quad core / i7 / 7th Generation
RAM= 8 GB
OS= in case of windows 64bit windows7,8,10 Or server 2012 or higher
Virtualization: virtualization extensions required.

your hardware requirements will increase, If you want to simulate the more advanced lab with many virtual devices, You have required at least 512 MB memory against single virtual Router, and it will be increment as your number of devices are increased and in case of VM/IOU its depends on their OS/IOS. In case of VMware VM running windows 7,8,10 2GB for each VM.

Cisco Server or ESXI Server Recommendations:

OS=Ubuntu 64 bit GNS3 Qemu 2.6.0 or latest Windows 8.1 GNS3 VMWare Workstation
RAM= 64GB to128GB RAM.
Quad Core Processor

Last words: GNS3 hardware requirements directly depend on your network topologies, please share the hardware which you are using for your GNS3 in comments. Thank you for visiting...!