When Christophe Fillot began emulating Cisco routers with Dynamips, each instance of a simulated router required its own instance of Dynamips, along with a string of command line options to specify, for example, the amount of RAM, the interfaces, and the virtual connections to other instances of Dynamips. This soon gave way to an improved user interface using a hypervisor approach where a single instance of Dynamips could be initiated which accepted commands over a TCP pipe, usually on port 7200
, so chosen because the Cisco 7200 was the first router to be emulated.
For a bit of fun, why not check out the Dynamips hypervisor yourself. From a command line, start Dynamips as a hypervisor running on port 7200
using the command:
dynamips –H 7200
Now start a telnet session to your localhost IP on port 7200:
telnet 127.0.0.1 7200
And finally issue a command Dynamips understands — the command ethsw create SW1 creates an instance of a generic switch. You should see a reply...