Network lab setup

Now, we will start building our networking lab on a popular platform called EVE-NG. You could, of course, use a physical node to implement the topology, but a virtualized environment gives us an isolated and sandboxed environment to test many different configurations, plus the flexibility to add/remove nodes to/from the topology with a few clicks. Also, we can have multiple snapshots to our configuration so we can revert back to any scenario at any time.

EVE-NG (formerly known as UNetLab) is one of the most popular choices in network emulation. It supports a wide range of virtualized nodes from different vendors. There's another option, which is GNS3, but, as we will see during this chapter and the next one, EVE-NG provides many features that make it a solid choice for network modeling.

EVE-NG comes in three editions: Community, Pro, and Learning Center. We will use the Community edition as it contains all the features that we will need during this book.