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Getting Started with NVIDIA Networking

Man with a laptop.Preview and test Cumulus Linux in your own environment, at your own pace, without organizational or economic barriers. Man with a laptop.

Looking to try open networking for free? Try NVIDIA Cumulus VX—a free virtual appliance that provides all the features of NVIDIA Cumulus Linux. You can preview and test Cumulus Linux in your own environment, at your own pace, without organizational or economic barriers. You can also produce sandbox environments for prototype assessment, preproduction rollouts, and script development.

Cumulus VX runs on all popular hypervisors, such VirtualBox and VMware VSphere, and orchestrators, such as Vagrant and GNS3. 

Our website has the images needed to run NVIDIA Cumulus VX on your preferred hypervisor—download is simple. What’s more, we provide a detailed guide on how to install and set up Cumulus VX to create this simple two leaf, one spine topology.

Figure 1. Cumulus VX two leaf, one spine topology.

With these three switches up and running, you are all set to try out NVIDIA Cumulus Linux features, such as traditional networking protocols (BGP and MLAG), and NVIDIA Cumulus-specific technologies, such as ONIE and Prescriptive Topology Manager (PTM). And, not to worry, the Cumulus Linux User’s Guide is always close at hand to help you out, as well as the community Slack channel, where you can submit questions and engage with the wider community.

Explore further and try advanced configurations:

  • Update your virtual environment to use the NVIDIA Cumulus Linux on-demand self-paced labs (a quick and easy way to learn the fundamentals.) 
  • Run the topology converter to simulate a custom network topology with VirtualBox and Vagrant, or KVM-QEMU and Vagrant.

If your needs are different, or if you have platform or disk limitations, we also provide an alternative to NVIDIA Cumulus VX. NVIDIA Cumulus in the Cloud is a free, personal, virtual data center network that provides a low-effort way to see NVIDIA Cumulus technology in action—no hypervisor needed.

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