Cisco Catalyst 8000V Vagrant box

A procedure for creating a Cisco Catalyst 8000V Vagrant box for the libvirt provider.

Prerequisites

• Cisco Modeling Labs subscription
• Git
• uv
• libvirt with client tools
• QEMU
• Vagrant >= 2.4.0
• vagrant-libvirt
• unzip
• Expect
• Telnet

Steps

0. Verify the prerequisite tools are installed.

which git uv unzip libvirtd virsh qemu-system-x86_64 expect telnet vagrant

vagrant plugin list

1. Point your web browser to the CML Software Download page.

2. Click the Download icon for the Cisco Modeling Labs reference platform ISO file (June 2025).

3. Save the refplat-20250616-fcs-iso.zip file to your Downloads folder.

4. Open your favorite terminal emulator, and change to the Downloads directory.

cd ~/Downloads

5. Create the cml29-refplat directory.

mkdir -p cml29-refplat

6. Uncompress the refplat-20250616-fcs-iso.zip file into the cml29-refplatdirectory.

unzip refplat-20250616-fcs-iso.zip -d cml29-refplat

7. Change to the cml29-refplat directory.

cd cml29-refplat

8. Create a mount point directory.

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/iso

9. Mount the ISO file.

sudo mount -o loop refplat-20250616-fcs.iso /mnt/iso

10. Copy (and rename) the disk image file to the /var/lib/libvirt/images directory.

sudo cp /mnt/iso/virl-base-images/cat8000v-17-16-01a/c8000v-universalk9_8G_serial.17.16.01a.qcow2 /var/lib/libvirt/images/cisco-cat8kv.qcow2

11. Unmount the ISO file.

sudo umount /mnt/iso

12. Modify the file ownership.

The owner and/or group will differ between Linux distributions.

sudo chown libvirt-qemu:libvirt-qemu /var/lib/libvirt/images/cisco-cat8kv.qcow2

13. Set the file as executable.

sudo chmod u+x /var/lib/libvirt/images/cisco-cat8kv.qcow2

14. Create the boxes directory.

mkdir -p ~/boxes

15. Start the default network (if not already started).

virsh -c qemu:///system net-start default

16. Clone this GitHub repo and cd into the directory.

git clone https://github.com/mweisel/cisco-catalyst-8kv-vagrant-libvirt && cd cisco-catalyst-8kv-vagrant-libvirt

17. Create a Python virtual environment for Ansible.

uv sync

18. Run the Ansible playbook.

uv run ansible-playbook main.yml

19. Copy (and rename) the Vagrant box artifact to the boxes directory.

cp cisco-cat8kv.box ~/boxes/cisco-cat8000v-17.16.01a.box

20. Copy the box metadata file to the boxes directory.

cp ./files/cisco-cat8000v.json ~/boxes/

21. Change the current working directory to boxes.

cd ~/boxes

22. Substitute the HOME placeholder string in the box metadata file.

sed -i "s|HOME|${HOME}|" cisco-cat8000v.json

awk '/url/{gsub(/^ */,"");print}' cisco-cat8000v.json

output:

"url": "file:///home/marc/boxes/cisco-cat8000v-17.16.01a.box"

23. Add the Vagrant box to the local inventory.

vagrant box add cisco-cat8000v.json

Debug

To view the telnet session output for the expect task:

tail -f ~/cat8kv-console.explog

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details