“Router-in-a-box”: on tin, in ESX or even Citrix

So you have your nice VMware based ESXi lab with multiple VLANs but you only have a Layer 2 switch! Enter Vyatta, “router-in –a-box”

Vyatta is a handy little Open Source router requiring  a meagre 174Mb of disk and as little as 512Mb RAM and it is really quite something.

Vyatta, who not so long ago received a $10m in fudning led by Citrix, claims to outperform Cisco routers! I haven’t verified these claims myself but it would seems plausible considering the amount of resource available to today’s servers.

It is downloadable for free in a handy Virtual Appliance direct from Vyatta http://www.vyatta.com/.

How to deploy this in your lab:

Vyatta has a good Quick Start guide at http://www.vyatta.com/downloads/documentation.php

1) Install the Virtual Appliance

2) Add one NIC per VLAN (note the order that you assign the VLANs)

3) Run your Vyatta VM

4) Log in to Vyatta with username “vyatta” and password “vyatta”

4) type “configure”

5) use the variations of the “set interfaces ethernet eth0 10.1.1.1/24” command to assign an IP to each NIC – eth0 is the first vNIC that you configured in “edit settings”.

The above example assumes you are using 10.1.1.1/24 as the default gateway for your first VLAN

And now you are routing with your “router-in-a-box”

Next Steps

So once you have basic routing, why not inspect some of the other features of Vyatta?

• Add static routes to reach the outside world
• Cluster Vyatta across ESX hosts using VRRP
• Create an IPSEC VPN in to your lab

Helpful documentation can be found on the Vyatta website and on the community forums.

Happy Routing!

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