Hello.

I'm pretty sure other users on the web might be facing difficulties with GNS3 on windows 10.

Running CHR on QEMU causes a lot of trouble. It doesn't become responsive. Ping >2000ms. And sudden shutdown.
In addition QEMU is limited with interfaces... I can't add more than 25 interface in one project.

When running CHR on a virtual machine alone it works like a charm.

Can anyone share his experience with GNS3 ?
And maybe posts a detailed walkthrough setting up CHR on GNS3 through VMWare or VirtualBox ??

It'd be much appreciated for all of us.

Hi MustaMT,

there is a lot of info on this topic (and also on Unified Networking Lab)
http://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=99658

My (somewhat dated but) working Mix of GNS3, Qemu and CHR versions is

http://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php ... 50#p522618

- GNS3 1.4.3
- QEMU 2.4.0 (released August 11th 2015) using qemu-system-x86_64w.exe
- CHR 6.33.5

I set the CHRs up directly in GNS3 using raw-images



Startup of the nodes in GNS3 takes some time, but afterwards they run reliably and are quite responsive. I can access them either via Winbox (through a loop device) or via Terminal directly through GNS3.

Yes i did follow that tutorial in the first place.

On my device the Virtual QEMU machines load well but the ping is in high 2000ms

In addition i can not add more than 10 interfaces/QEMU machine showing an error message of too much NICs.

do u have the issue with the interface name which start from ether0 but not ether1 ?
and also, if i disable the interface and enable again, i cannot ping to the direct connected interface.

very strange.

do u have the issue with the interface name which start from ether0 but not ether1 ?

In the router's device Template, on the network tab, under Name Format, change it to "ether{port1}" instead. Then the name and numbering will be consistent with MikroTik's default naming

Hello.

I'm pretty sure other users on the web might be facing difficulties with GNS3 on windows 10.

Running CHR on QEMU causes a lot of trouble. It doesn't become responsive. Ping >2000ms. And sudden shutdown.
In addition QEMU is limited with interfaces... I can't add more than 25 interface in one project.

When running CHR on a virtual machine alone it works like a charm.

Can anyone share his experience with GNS3 ?
And maybe posts a detailed walkthrough setting up CHR on GNS3 through VMWare or VirtualBox ??

It'd be much appreciated for all of us.

I have had the same problem. I solved downgrading the qemu version to 2.1.2.
I usually run the devices with nested kvm.

I prefer to run CHR images in Virtualbox - my favorite thing about it is that I can add/remove network links w/o having to stop the router. This requirement is because of how qemu works - it instantiates the virtual ethernet interfaces at launch time and doesn't (seem to) support dynamically adding/removing interface connections. Virtualbox doesn't have this problem, but it is limited to just 4 NICs in my experience. Virtualbox seems to run better as well. The one thing about it that's annoying to me is that it seems to break 802.1q tagging.

Virtualbox support up to 8 NICs IIRC. GUI is limited to 4. You can enable rest of them via CLI or XML VM config file.

You can enable rest of them via CLI or XML VM config file.

Thanks for the tip - I'll have to check into that. I've never really run into a situation where I required more than 4 interfaces in my simulations, but that could come in handy. I wonder if it's not in the GUI because while supported, it's not recommended for some reason or other. . .

Anyway I do have a question for you - do you know why CHR + Virtualbox has problems with 802.1q tagged frames? Is there a setting I can tweak that will allow me to tx/rx frames with an 802.1q header? (off-hand, I forget which direction has the tagged frames getting dropped, but it's only one direction)