This post is going to go over the basics of setting up a few Juniper vSRXs instead of VMware Workstation 11 but it will work fine if your not running the latest and greatest version yet.

Ideally you’ll want to be able to give each VM around 2gb of RAM but you can always lower it as needed.

Before we get started you’ll want to configure your computer’s NIC(s) for ideal VM communication by going to your Network adapter’s advanced properties in Device Manager and disabling anything to do with Offloading. If you don’t do this you’ll see some weird communication issues when trying to reach the VMs from the host computer.

Step 1: Download an evaluation of Firefly using from here and save the OVA file somewhere where you can find it.

Step 2: Open up VMware Workstation and open the saved OVA file (File -> Open -> OVA file)
Alternatively you can also just double click the OVA file if Workstation has the file asscoation.

Step 3: In the Import Virtual Machine box, change the name to something that suits you and pick where you want to save the virtual machine and then click import.

I tend to use the following naming convention in my VM based labs if you want to easily follow along.
Vendor-<R for Routers|SW for Switches| FW for Firewalls>##

Step 4: Read and accept the License agreement and wait for the import process to complete.

Once its imported you should see something along the lines of Juniper-R01 depending on how you named your VM. Now a router without any friends is a lonely router indeed so we’ll need to make 3 more vSRXs for it to play with. We will also want to increase the number of interfaces from 2 to 8 so we have more flexibility.

You can either deploy the OVA 3 more times and add the interfaces to each of them…or you can add the interfaces to Juniper-R01 and clone it to save some time!

Edit Juniper-R01’s virtual machine settings, click Add, and select Network Adapter.

The Network Adapter type doesn’t matter because I will be using LAN segments to connect the VMs together. You can pick either NAT or Host-only for now.

Keep adding interfaces until you get to 8 interfaces, you can get away with 4 for most purposes
but I find it easier to have the interfaces ready if needed.

Once your done its time to clone Juniper-R01 in order to make more routers to play with.

Click VM -> Manage -> Clone

Click next as we don’t have any snapshots at this stage of the game.

I personally prefer making full clones for labs because then I don’ t need to worry about maintaining the original VM.

Name the VM and click Finish!
Rise and repeat until you have 4 VMs in total.

At this point we can start building our topology as we see fit!
To keep things simple and unimaginative we will connect our routers together like so.

We do this in VMware Workstation by using LAN segments, which logically connects the VM’s Network Adapter to another VM’s Network Adapter.

Edit Juniper-R01’s Virtual Machine settings and click the Network Adapter 2 click the Lan Segment radio and then click LAN Segments on the bottom.

Click Add and enter the 3 networks you see in the screen shot below, the names themselves don’t have to be exactly what I picked so use whatever makes sense to you.

The first VM Network Adapter will be kept on Bridge mode so it can be our management interface.

Click OK and make sure Network Adapter 2 is using the R1 -> R2 LAN segment and get out the settings page.

Now you just need to go through each VM and make sure they are connected like so.

R1:
NA1 – Bridged
NA2 – R1 -> R2

R2:
NA1 – Bridged
NA2 – R1 -> R2
NA3 – R2 -> R3

R3:
NA1 – Bridged
NA2 – R2 -> R3
NA3 – R3 -> R4

R2:
NA1 – Bridged
NA2 – R3 -> R4

Lastly, it is possible for VMware Workstation and Junos to sometimes not agree on the NIC binding order so Network Adapter 1 may actually be seen as GE-0/0/3 instead of GE-0/0/0. Before getting too far in your lab it is a good idea to check that the mac address of the interface is what you expect it to be.

If you go under your VM’s settings and select Network Adapter, click Advanced to see the mac address the VM has generated for the NIC (incidentally you can change the mac if desired as well)

Now start up the VM and enter the below commands to verify the mac address.

Happy vSRXing!