The conductor of the orchestra is of course the GNS3 GUI, who wields its Dynagen-like baton — the GNS3 management console, to control the three main sections in the orchestra: Dynamips, qemuwrapper, and vboxwrapper. Let me take you through a complex suite with a variety of objects: Cisco routers, generic switches, Qemu devices, and VirtualBox devices. You will observe multiple TCP connections and UDP pipes being created from both the GNS3 management console and your operating system's command line. To get a closer look at how the conductor works, open GNS3 to a new blank canvas and issue the command debug 3 in the GNS3 command console:
=> debug 3
As you open GNS3, the conductor readies the players awaiting your instructions. The moment you drag your first Cisco router onto the workspace, GNS3 spawns an instance of Dynamips and connects to it on port 7200
. You can see this in two places: