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Cisco IOU and VMware vSwitch

I have been looking around the interweb seeing Cisco IOU kicking around,I began to wonder how you could integrate this into an environment where you can build a lab with connections to external devices. e.g Firewalls, ACS server, other vendor routers etc. Particularly how would I build a test environment assuming that I could legitimately use IOU.  Anyway after looking a the article  http://inetpro.org/wiki/Connect_IOU_with_real_networks_or_dynamips I could how this could be done with a physical machine, but how would this relate to an IOU machine in ESX Vmware. I would have multiple NICs tied to different VLANS, then use IOU2Net to connect interfaces in IOU to these different network; easy!!!

So as I sit back and dream of what could be if Cisco would release a version that I could be use in such a way, I realized a problem. "promiscuous mode" - this is require for traffic to traverse from the real work back into the IOU instance, however if you add new NICs to a vSwitch in ESX then the default is to have "promiscuous mode" rejected.

So in essence here is a tip based on theory. If you are building a IOU environment in ESX then enable "promiscuous mode".

If any one can validate this theory then please post in the comments.

 
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