gns3

My journey to complete network virtualization and automation.

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Creating a GNS3 topology programmatically

The first goal is to create a GNS3 topology programmatically. This is going to be either an Ansible playbook or python code leveraging the GNS3 REST API.

In the long run, I hope to use playbooks, but I assume that its easier to get started with plain python.

Getting started with the GNS3 API

https://gns3-server.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

• create two VPC nodes and draw them on the canvas
• connect them
• start the nodes
• use Postman to manage API calls

Using gns3fy to access the GNS3 API through Python

https://davidban77.github.io/gns3fy/

• create two VPC nodes
• connect them
• start / stop the nodes
• put topology info into separate file (YAML)
• research NDL (network description language) as a possible format to store topology
• for better visualization, give nodes different coordinates
• ...

Using Ansible to manage GNS3

https://davidban77.hashnode.dev/automate-your-network-labs-with-ansible-and-gns3-part-1-ck15f0bze000byos1q11xev5c

https://github.com/davidban77/ansible-collection-gns3

• check API version of the GNS3 server
• create two VPC nodes
• create 2 Routers from template
• connect & start them
• get their running config
• push config to them