How To - Multiple Olives On One Box Using Vmware

Posted by Ahsan Tasneem | 11:04 AM | , , , , , | 0 comments »

Creating virtual serial ports for telnet access (so no physical com port access required)...
Having one Olive box is great for CLI familiarity but multiple Olives interacting with each other is the only way to really get to grips with the routing protocols and route filtering techniques. Once one Olive session is fully built, it's a piece of cake to mirror this so you can have 2 or 3 or more (resources dependant) on one box. The main limiting factor of this approach is the lack of physical serial ports on the server. Mine only has a single COM1. To get round this, I used the FREEWARE
HW Virtual Serial Port v2.5.10 software from HW-group. Using the command line (or creating shortcuts in the Windows user profile startup folder so it was persistent), I created 3 new virtual serial ports that were setup as telnet servers (COM2 on port 2009, COM3 on port 2010, COM4 on port 2011) so I can telnet to these and be "attached" to the various Olive console ports. Yes, this does mean my doctoring of the cable above was interesting, but not entirely necessary.


The software in the URL above does not create a COM port that VMWare will recognise and place in a drop-down menu, so you need to remove the virtual machine from VMWare (NOT DELETE!!), then edit the .vmx file and specify the virtual port, then re-open the .vmx into VMWare and it will honour your manual configurations. The important lines are:


serial0.present = "TRUE"
serial0.fileName = "COM4"
serial0.fileType = "device"



Creating a virtual COM2 that can be telnetted to VMWare server IP address at port 2009:
"C:\Program Files\HW group\HW VSP\HW_VSP.exe" -R -c2 -S1 -s2009 -N0 -H1 -F0 -P1Creating a virtual COM3 that can be telnetted to VMWare server IP address at port 2010:
"C:\Program Files\HW group\HW VSP\HW_VSP.exe" -R -c3 -S1 -s2010 -N0 -H1 -F0 -P1Creating a virtual COM4 that can be telnetted to VMWare server IP address at port 2011:
"C:\Program Files\HW group\HW VSP\HW_VSP.exe" -R -c4 -S1 -s2011 -N0 -H1 -F0 -P1This worked well with Putty and Windows telnet, however SecureCRT had some issues - I had to configure "Force character at a time mode" in the session options, else the intuitive features built in to JUNOS did not work such as the use of "space" to auto-complete configuration commands.






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