Reloading (or doing a configure replace) on IOL takes seconds, whereas IOSv still takes about a minute or more. Even after getting the VIRL VM on ESXi tweaked, it still takes about two minutes for the IOSv instances to come up. That is certainly not the case with IOSv. I can run several tens of instances of IOL nodes on my MacBook Pro, and have all of them up and running in less than a minute, all in a VM with only 4GB of RAM. I thought the IOSv nodes were going to be very similar to IOL nodes with regards to resource usage, but unfortunately, that is not yet the case. The IOSv nodes, while they do take up substantially less RAM, are still surprisingly resource intensive, especially with regards to CPU usage. I knew that the CSR1000Vs were fairly RAM hungry, but at the same time they are meant to be production routers, so that’s definitely a fair tradeoff for good performance. I then moved it to my ESXi server, which is definitely more appropriate for this software in its current state. However, its use was very limited as I was unable to load more than a few nodes. I installed it on my 16GB MacBook Pro first, and allocated 8GB to it. My first impression of VIRL is that it is a BEAST of a VM with regards to CPU and RAM consumption. Until now, I have been using any combination of real hardware, CSR1000Vs, and IOL instances for studying and proof of concept testing. Since it has been out for more than a year, and has been developed and improved tremendously during that time, I decided to finally take the plunge and buy a year’s subscription to the Cisco VIRL software.

Iosv cisco