VyOS – Vyatta Open Source

If you ever used Vyatta before or not, It's worth to test it. During a long time, there was Vyatta as an OpenSource router/firewall. I just recently discovered that Vyatta is no more and that Vyata's Brocade acquisition stopped further availability. This led to new free VyOS, which is a free and opensource version of Vyatta developed by the community.

VyOS provides a free and open source routing platform that competes directly with other commercially available solutions from well-known Network providers. Vyatta's first release was in 2006 and since then the routing platform has been improved and developed.

Quote from the product page:

VyOS is a community fork of Vyatta, a Linux-based network operating system that provides software-based network routing, firewall, and VPN functionality.

• Runs on both physical and virtual platforms.
• Supports paravirtual drivers and integration packages for virtual platforms.
• Completely free and open source.

There are an ISO or OVA files available, so depending on where you want to install/deploy the router/firewall in your environment you can choose.

The requirements on vSphere are very low – 2 Gigs of disk space and 512 Mb of RAM! If you deploy from the OVA file, then it's, even more, easier as the VM is already pre-configured and with VMware tools installed. All you need to do is through vSphere client (or vSphere web client) to go to the File > Deploy ovf template.

You'll have to add some NICs to the VM as the OVF package does not provide any out-of-the-box. But that's nothing, just edit the VMs config and add a NIC (I took the default E1000, which works fine). Unsure that VMXNET 2 or 3 does work as well. VMXNET 3 is fully supported.

If you got an experience, just don't hesitate to comment.

It's really a lightweight package to work with. There is a very good user guide on the website there to get you started. You'll be able to do a basic configuration, activate SSH etc.

I'm VyOS/Vyatta beginner I must say, but learned that it's possible to upload a config file via SSH as well. So in case you have a really long and complex config to do, it's probably more convenient to do it in a Notepad and then just upload to the appliance.

The VyOS CLI is comprised of an operational mode and a configuration mode.

Operational mode allows for commands to perform operational system tasks and view system and service status, while configuration mode allows for the modification of system configuration.

The CLI provides a built-in help system. In the CLI the [?] key may be used to display available commands. The [tab] key can be used to auto-complete commands and will present the help system upon a conflict or unknown value.

For example typing sh followed by the [tab] key will complete to show.

Pressing [tab] a second time will display the possible sub-commands of the show command.

VyOS does not come with web interface, but you might try vyBuddy which is Ubuntu based with GUI (1Gb download)

Source: VyOS page