Windows 8 and GNS3. Already?

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not kind of guy that rushes to install newest and “greatest” Windows products, but one of my laptops is crying out loud to be reinstalled! Windows 7 *was* working nice these years, but month after month, a ton of apps got installed one after another until W7 could not cope with them any more. So, it’s a time to do a clean install and start all over again. Well, if I’m going to start from the scratch, I might as well try a Windows 8.

Out of dozen or two of applications, I really need just a few of them that have to work at any platform I’m using. Others? Well, all of them have some sort of substitution. One of those that does not have a substitution and that dictates what OS I will be running is GNS3. If GNS3 can run on Windows 8, it’s worth a shot. If not – the hell with Windows 8!

So, can it be done?

The latest GNS3 code can be found here. This blog is about 0.8.3 version. After downloading let’s try installing it:

D’oh!!

It looks like WinPcap does not work with W8. We do have option to proceed and try our luck, and that’s what we are going to do. So we click “Run the program without getting help”:

 

Ok, not a big deal. Let’s continue…

In the Wireshark installation dialog, we should de-select “Install WinPcap 4.1.2”, because it is obvious that it won’t work.

Now we run GNS3 and test the hyperrvisor:

And there is this “Failed to determine version of Dynamips”. D’oh!

Don’t try to play with path or ports – it won’t work.

We need a different approach, but first we need to de-install GNS3 and Wireshark. In our next try, we will download a winpcap separately from http://www.winpcap.org/install/. A file is called WinPcap_4_1_2.exe. We will not just install this file, but will rather install it in a Windows 7 compatibility mode. We right click a file, select properties, compatibility tab and the choose a Windows 7 compatibility mode:

 

We click ok and then install the application as usual. We will still receive a compatibility warning, but application does install.

Now we install GNS3 again but when doing so we need to de-select WinPcap, because it is already installed:

Same goes when installing a Wireshark.

If we now try to test settings, we have somewhat better situation

Qemu seems not having any issues:

So far I did calculated IdlePC and try very basic lab:

and routers do ping each other. A capture also works:

I also tried ASA 8.4.2 code and it is working. Didn’t try the IPS yet, but I think it will be ok.

At this time I cannot discuss a performance and other issues, because I only played with this setup for a couple of hours, but I do hope I’m going to be able to try Windows 8 and still use GNS3.

Best of luck with GNS3, Dynamips and Qemu on Windows 8!