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System requirements

Size the host so first boot and your first labs succeed.

Infrastructure view with host capacity
Infrastructure view with host capacity

Sizing

The OVA ships at the absolute minimum. Raise CPU and memory before you start many QEMU nodes or heavy guests such as vJunos.

TiervCPURAMDisk
Absolute minimum (OVA default)48 GB40 GB SSD
Teaching and light labs8–1616–32 GB200–250 GB SSD or NVMe
Advanced and nested NOS16–32+64–128+ GB500 GB–1 TB NVMe

Tip

Before Start all, check Home → Launch Budget to see how much capacity a lab will use.

Nested virtualization on VMware

QEMU-based nodes need hardware virtualization inside the VEX-NX VM.

  1. Turn off Hyper-V on the Windows host. Workstation can only expose VT-x when Hyper-V and hypervisorlaunchtype are off. Reboot afterwards.
  2. Edit the VEX-NX VM's processor settings. Turn on Virtualize Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI and Virtualize CPU performance counters. Virtualize IOMMU is optional.
  3. Check inside the appliance. After boot, run the command below. If /dev/kvm is missing, KVM-based templates will not start.
bash
ls -l /dev/kvm

On ESXi, turn on Expose hardware assisted virtualization to the guest in the VM settings.

Bare metal

For deeply nested guests such as vJunos or nested ESXi labs, install from USB on a physical server and enable VT-x or AMD-V in BIOS/UEFI.

Browser

Use a current Chrome, Edge, or Firefox. Allow pop-ups for the appliance if you use the SecureCRT or PuTTY helper.