Use the FreesCO router in your virtual environment
By on Wednesday, November 28, 2007 5:01 PM
Provides an overview of a great little router that you can easily run in your VMWare environment.
Have you ever needed a router for testing in your VMWare environment? Like me you might want to test things such as:
- Multiple AD sites and subnets
- OWA and Exchange FE/BE scenarios.
To get as close to the production environment as possible you really need to work with multiple subnets. It's difficult to do this in a virtual environment without a router. In the past I have found workarounds using the IP Router capabilites within Windows XP, but it's less than satisfactory because you either have to compromise security on your host machine (by enabling it as a router), or dedicate a guest machine to the routing role, which adds an overhead.
I recently came across the FreeSCO Router and it has transformed my VMWare experience!
What is FreeSCO?
FREESCO (stands for FREE ciSCO) is a free Linux-based replacement for commercial routers supporting up to 10 ethernet/arcnet/token_ring/arlan network cards and up to 10 modems. It also has some basic firewall capabilities.
So why is it so uesful for VMWare environments?
It is really small, so it won't chew up your resources. You can boot it from a floppy image file (*.flp), which means that you don't need to assign a dedicated hard disk to it. And it only needs 8MB of RAM (although 16MB is better).
You can download a pre-built floppy image file for VMWare from here:
http://www.vmguru.com/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownload&cid=6
Do I need to be Linux guru to get it working?
Knowing a few Linux commands will make things easier, but the setup program is simple and intuitive.
What versions of VMWare will it work with?
I have it running on VMWare Workstation 4.5.2, but there is no reason why it shouldn't work with later versions. I know of people who have it running with both GSX and ESX server.
Will it work with Microsoft Virtual PC / Virtual Server?
The jury is still out on this. I got the floppy image to boot using Virtual PC, but FreeSCO could then not find the network cards I had assigned to it. Your mileage may vary.
Sounds great. Where can I find more information?
http://www.freesco.org/
