One distant evning a year or so ago I discovered the wonderful software called Eve-ng, I was curious and wanting to get more into home labs to support studying for my JNCIP-SP as my JNCIS was coming up for expiry!
I find the possibility to virtulize Juniper MX’s on it and I see a few tutorials showing it off so I try and spin it up on my computer.
Now my computer isn’t too bad but its not exactly made for something like EVE-NG
– I7 6700k (4 core 8 threads)
– 16Gb DDR4 ram
– GTX 1070
Pretty good specs for a gaming/editing PC but not for Memory/CPU Core hungry Network emulation! So I thought, if only I could get a server for this!
Looking into AWS I could have ran something for around around $1.5-2 per hour. While It sounds cheap over time I felt like this would just end up costing more and more with nothing physical to show for it in the end! (A bit like renting a house but thats another rant I don’t have time for right now!
As I ruled out cloud instances I decided to go down the route of buying a server at some point and if I’m honest I lost interest at this point for some time… I was living in a two bed flat with no good storage/bedroom/office space in Dublin, not too sure about where I was going and If was going to stay in Ireland… A few months passed and I finally knew I’d be moving back to the UK
So about a 2/3 months back I joined a wonderful company called Techex, they deal with Broadcast/Video Over IP with their own software but also providing technical advice and assistance with solutions for broadcast. They work out of an office in bracknell in the UK so once the Covid-19 situation died down a bit I managed to make a move back to the UK with the attitude to ensure I had a house/apartment with a good office space.
I managed to secure a place that both me and my partner were super happy with and I bagged the big room for my office.
Obviously now I’ve got the space but what do I fill it with I asked myself??
I tried good old Ebay but typing “server” into ebay without any specific goal was a bit daunting I didn’t really know what I was getting into, what was good, what worked what didn’t and didn’t really want the hassle of troubeshooting a possible DOA Server!
After a few days/evenings of feeling lost trying to find a company to Bargin Hardware, they had a pretty nice selection of servers both barebones and also ones with the ability to customize them which was perfect for me!
Long story short I ended up with https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/supermicro-cse-815-v2-configure-to-order #NotSponsored!
I ended up selected 2 Xeon E5-2650 V2 ‘s (8 cores, 32 threads in total), about 96Gb of ram, a cheap 400Gb SSD and sent it off for order for around £450 including shipping
I chose supermicro as it seemed to be the cheapest option and for me price was a key factor, I didn’t really want to drop thousands on a server that I might not even use that much!
I also went with Bargain hardware as it seems like they would test the config and bench mark it all before sending out for shipping which was reassuring to know I wasn’t getting something that might have issues or compatibility bugs!
Once It arrived I unpacked it and got to work. My initial thoughts where to run ESXI on it which I’ve had a bit of experience with at work but because I was using the free version It had a limit of 8 VCPU’s you could assign! When I’ve got a server sat there with a possible 32 VCPU’s this wasn’t going to work! I guess for most this works well if they want to run a few light weight vms of different OS’s but for me I needed most if not all of those CPU’s to make a half decent topology!
I then thought well I want to also run ubuntu to do some general linux things at the same time so maybe I can just run Ubunut and use one of the Virtulization softwares in Ubunut Desktop to get EVE-NG running!
Great I thought, Spun it up and loaded up Virtual box and installed the latest version of Eve-ng community with 30 cores and about 90Gb assigned to EVE-NG thinking nothing of it, what could go wrong I asked myself.
To this day I still think if my server had a face it’d be giving me this look when I did this and spent the best part of 15 hours over the next few weeks trying to troubleshoot it!
So anywayyyyy here’s me ignorantly blissful loading up my EVE-NG with a few old vMX and Arista EOS images
(Arista seems to be the vendor of choice in the media industry, I still don’t fully understand why but anyway I’m going off topic!)
so I draw out of my standard CPE, PE, Core, PE, CPE MPLS topology with a few old Junos 14.3 VMX’s (I thought I’d start simple with the nested image) and tried to boot them… well I tried to boot them one at a time. It took about 10-15 minuets for the first one to boot so I tried booting a group of 3 or 4…
An hour passes and they are all still stuck at a random prompt skipping a memory capacity check and don’t move from there…
Here in follows about 14 hours of trying different settings, booting one at a time or even a different image and still no beans, always stuck at the same prompt!
Its then when I thought, hey what if the host OS just isn’t releasing the resources correctly… BINGO Checked the system resources monitor on Ubuntu and found its hardly using any of my CPU’s and ram… and decided fuck it lets go in bare, if it doesn’t work I can always pull out 😉
Its at this point I found a few nice guides on how to do a bare install. One specific youtube video by Christian Scholz @chsjuniper on twitter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYI5_XC1iHE
I started off ignoring the prompt that suggested to install from a Ubuntu 16 image thinking well the new 2020 image is out so it makes sense to install the most recent one… this was another mistake… At this point, it’s starting to feel like a game of total wipeout!
I followed the guide to the letter but kept installing via my shitty vga monitor directly hooked up to my server… ohh what a mistake. I kept trying to run the installation script to install eve-ng and well it’d run and show no errors to me as it whizzed past all the steps it took to try and install and I was left with no prompt or anything to worry about… I rebooted but nothing, it wouldn’t work! I tried that 3 more times before logging in via SSH (I’m stubborn I know!) and realizing with the scroll back it wasn’t installing correctly as it couldn’t find all the dependencies…
2 hours of googling later trying to install them I gave up and followed the Guide to the letter, installing using ubuntu 16 and following every single step exactly!
Only now after so many tries did I finally get prompted by the eve-ng login screen when it finally came back from the reboot!
It worked!
I Copy across my images, boot up the Web ui
Build a quick lab with 13 vMX’s and they all boot within a few minutes with no hanging or errors! It was a relief!
Now all I need is the energy to lab and get back stuck in with my JNCIP-SP learning!
But for now I’m going to set fire to my computer with Flight sim 2020 and have a break from it all!
Moral of the story… Don’t let the first big red ball stop you from crossing all 4 to get to the finish line!
Hello Jonathan,
Well written article, even I am trying to set-up my home lab to start with Juniper world.
Is this what your server configuration looks like:
SUPERMICRO CSE-815 X9DRI-LN4F+ E5-2600 V2 1U 4X 3.5″ (LFF)
Chassis1 x SuperMicro CSE-815 X9DRi-LN4F+ V2 CPU (1U) 4x LFF Hot-Swap SAS – Non Hot-Swap PSU, Processor(s)2 x Intel Xeon E5-2650L V2 – 10-Core 1.70GHz (25MB Cache, 7.20GTs, 70W) , Heatsink(s)2 x Supermicro 1U – Heatsink , Memory (RAM)8 x 16GB – DDR3L 1600MHz (PC3L-12800R, 2RX4, ECC REG) , RAID1 x SuperMicro Onboard (SATA) RAID Kit , Hard Drive(s) & SSD(s)2 x 1TB – SATA-3 (7,200 RPM, 6Gb/s) HDD – OEM, Hard Drive Caddy(s)2 x Supermicro LFF Hot-Swap Caddy, Power Cable(s)1 x EU Plug to C13 (Kettle Lead) Power Cable
Also can you point me to Juniper resources specially SP track, as you know there is a lot of content for Cisco, I am finding it hard to look for Juniper resources online
Hi Deepak,
Thanks for the feedback, I would say that looks good although there is one small difference between the one I’ve purchased and that is the CPU. I ordered the 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2650 V2 2.60Ghz Eight (8) Core LGA2011 95W.
This CPU has lower cores but is clocked higher so I’m not too sure what the difference would be between the two. I would suspect it would still work as expected with no major issue.
I however it might be worth you considering if Juniper Vlabs would be appropriate for your use case as they cover a number of topologies.
You can find them here https://jlabs.juniper.net/vlabs/ but the only issue is (at least when I signed up) you need a “professional” email rather than a Gmail or Hotmail email which makes it a bit awkward. Hopefully, this has changed since then.