Assignment One

Application Review

For:

By:

This report will review the feasibility and features of GNS3. An open source network design and
simulation application that has been crowd sourced and actively backed by a community of
users.

GNS3 is a crowd sourced project

bringing full network modeling and
simulation capabilities to the open
source format. It allows low cost of
entry for professionals to model and
test their network configurations. Key
features of the platform are its clean
interface, ease of use and large
community of networking
professionals who are consistently
collaborating to support GNS3.

GNS3 has the following positive points making it

worth using in a professional setting to model
network designs.
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Its a fully functional network simulator. It

accommodates the use of routers,
firewalls, switches, bridges, clouds, hosts
and wide range of protocols. Giving users
the ability to produce models to a high
level of detail.
Clean, user friendly interface which make
it simple to design with and easy to
understand when viewing designs.
Allows quick export of design to multiple
image file formats (PNG, JPG, BMP, PDF).

There are however some negative points which

take away from the application usefulness.
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Due to licensing issues, users must provide

their own Cisco IOS image and IOU license
to effectively use the application, as the
images are integral to GNS3s simulations.
Although installation is simple, quite a few
additional packages are required in order to
use GNS3 (Winpcap, Wireshark, Dynamips,
Qemu). Leading to bloat.
Vendor specific. As GNS3 is an early project,
it is not as fleshed out as other simulation
applications. Its list of useable devices are
mostly limited to Cisco products.

In conclusion, although GNS3 is a project with high potential, clean interface and strong
community backing. Its reliance on Cisco and requirement of a separate IOS image and license
make in difficult to recommend.