Yes, you read the title correct, free online virtualized Junos labs are available at the time of writing.
More information can be found here https://jlabs.juniper.net/vlabs/portal/index.page
Some caveats come with this though!
- You will need a Juniper account
- This requires a “professional” email address and standard hotmail/Gmail accounts won’t be accepted as far as I know
- Mine is setup from an old Academic email address used on a few cases for in-person training so maybe I have some specific permissions.
- Having said that I didn’t see any limits on the availability.
- Only one sandbox can be used at one time (Pretty reasonable)
- You can select from only 24 topologies which doesn’t give much flexibility to play/alter things as a normal personal lab would
- However the topology is the only fixed thing about it, the configuration is completely flexible and as far as I can tell the devices have feature parity to the VMX images you can get as trial.
- Labs can only be reserved for 6 hours which could be difficult if you want to do a whole day session of labs but otherwise this should cover most situations
- However there are options to save config so far and load this up in another session, I haven’t tried this yet but the official User guide does provide details.
Personally the above caveats are fine for my use and can be completely ignored and I feel most of my personal use cases can be covered by the topologies given.
On that topic there are 4 groups of topologies:
Routing
- OSPF Single Area (4 VMXs)
- OSPF Multi Area (6 VMXs)
- IS-IS – Single-area (4 vMXs)
- IS-IS – Multi-level/area (6 vMXs )
- BGP – Multi-AS (6 vMXs)
- BGP – Multi-AS with Route Reflection (6 vMXs, 2 vRRs)
Security
- Zones / Policies (1 vSRX, 3 endpoints)
- IPsec VPN – Policy-based (2 vSRXs, 2 endpoints)
- IPsec VPN – Route-based (2 vSRXs, 2 endpoints)
- NAT – Source & Destination (3 vSRXs, 2 endpoints)
Automation
- JET for Junos – Automation and Programmability (2 vMXs, Linux server)
- PyEZ for Junos – Automation and Programmability (2 vMXs, Linux server)
Network Management
- Contrail Enterprise Multicloud (Contrail 1909 with Contrail Command UI, 4 vQFXs, BMSs running CentOS 7.4)
- Contrail Enterprise Multicloud with Kubernetes (Contrail 1910 with Contrail Command UI, 1 vMX, Kubernetes 1.12)
- Contrail HealthBot ( 3 vMXs, Linux server, Contrail Healthbot 2.1.1)
- Sky Enterprise (1 vSRX, Connection to Juniper Sky Enterprise, 3 endpoints)
- Security Director (2 vSRXs, 2 endpoints, Security Director 19.1R1)
- Connectivity Services Director (Connectivity Services Director 4.2R1, 6 vMXs)