Howdy, everyone! I’ve been working on earning my CCNA. Since Cisco has made it screwy to import the Cisco Modeling Lab (CML) images into GNS3, I decided to bite the bullet and buy a license for CML.

Nothing has gone right. I tried to stand up the lab on VMWare Player as Cisco officially supports. The installation goes smoothly, but is unusable because the install keeps de-registering its license and times out when you try to renew the registration. Apparently there is a known issue with the Cisco SmartLicensing, and their own documentation says to submit a ticket if you experience the issue. When I contacted them, the response I received for an unusable product that cost $200 was, to paraphrase, “You’re on your own unless you pay us a lot more, peasant.”

I installed CML baremetal on an old laptop. It licenses without issue, but the Cisco image import during installation is completely broken. The lab is licensed, but I don’t actually have any of the virtualized devices to do lab things with.

As a final gambit, I took the baremetal image and installed it as a KVM/Qemu VM. It licenses correctly, AND the Cisco images/definitions import without issue, but any nodes you add to the lab basically implode and are unusable.

My current feelings are the I wasted $200 and should pursue a different cert because I can’t do the labs. I’ve found that Packet Tracer doesn’t allow for a significant number of functions my labs require, so I’m kind of SOL.

Does anyone have alternative recommendations? I chose CCNA because Network+ doesn’t really have much in terms of practical labs, but now I can’t progress in my CCNA studies because the lab software I paid for is riddled with issues (at least for me). What alternative courses could I pursue to round out my networking knowledge? Preferably something where I can get free images for GNS3 to do the labs, but I’m open to anything at this point. Any help is greatly appreciated.