Dynamips

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Dynamips is an emulator program that was written by Christophe Fillot to emulate Cisco routers. Dynamips runs on either Linux , Mac OS X and Windows and can emulate the hardware of the Cisco series routing platforms by directly booting an actual Cisco IOS software images into the emulator.^[1] It allows users to build complex network topologies to test the functionality of IOS on an desktop PC, without the need of an actual physical switch. Dynamips currently supports different networking medium such as Ethernet, Serial link, ATM, and POS interfaces for the 1700, 2600, 3600, 3700, and 7200 hardware platforms.^[2]

Dynamips is in active development and there are a few add-ons written for it. One of the most popular is Dynagen, which is a front-end add-on that allows the use of an INI configuration file to provision Dynamips emulator networks. The source code is licensed under the GNU GPL.