During waiting period for cisco router arrive in the lab, I’m looking for software which is able simulating cisco for student and myself like vmware that provide computer inside the computer.

I’m lucky to find very interesting software : Dynamips

From author site :

The goals of this emulator are mainly:

• To be used as a training platform, with software used in real world. It would allow people to become more familiar with Cisco devices, Cisco being the world leader in networking technologies ;
• Test and experiment the numerous and powerful features of Cisco IOS ;
• Check quickly configurations to be deployed later on real routers.

Of course, this emulator cannot replace a real router: you should be able to get a performance of about 1 kpps (depending on your host machine), to be compared to the 100 kpps delivered by a NPE-100 (the oldest NPE model). So, it is simply a complementary tool to real labs for administrators of Cisco networks or people wanting to pass their CCNA/CCNP/CCIE exams.

great, this tool will guide me to learn cisco.

Then I found other usefull software : Dynagen

From author site :

Dynagen is a front-end for use with the Dynamips Cisco router emulator. It uses an INI-like configuration file to provision Dynamips emulator networks. It takes care of specifying the right port adapters, generating and matching up those pesky NIO descriptors, specifying bridges, frame-relay, ATM switches, etc. It also provides a management CLI for listing devices, suspending and reloading instances, determining and managing idle-pc values, performing packet captures, etc.

Available on the Downloads page is a Windows installer package that includes Dynamips and Dynagen. The only dependency is Winpcap 4.0.

Wow, this make learning process become easy.

Still in need for basic question :

How do I get started ?

Google very generous, guide me to this usefull site, video for beginner like me 🙂
BlindHog, provide many video tutorial, for cheap price you can get very detail video on specific subject, awesome site 😉

Good enough for starting point, I’ll write my experience using this tool in this directory.

Cisco, I’m coming 🙂