It is amazing how sleepy you feel when sitting in a relatively dark auditorium after a buffet lunch.

I sat through a presentation on Junosphere which looked fantastic and just what the community has been crying out for so we no longer require to use olive’s that we cannot get support for.

The basic premise is that Juniper have provided a cloud infrastructure in order to run Junos based virtual network environments to train, educate and model scenarios.  You connect to your environment via an SSL VPN and can administer your devices.  Another handy feature is that you can run the VPN software on a server connected to a physical network and use this as a type of bridge to then connect your virtual network to the physical.  This is a big bonus if you need to test connectivity etc between say 2 devices running different versions of Junos.

One thing that does get me though is that Juniper announce this great new tool but at the moment is restricted to  being ran in the ‘cloud’ and you must be a partner/reseller in order to access.

I think they are really missing a trick by not offering this to the masses as it would certainly help in the take up of Juniper equipment to the SME market and also help people going through their Juniper certifications to lab scenarios to give them a better understanding.

Greg Ferro over at EtherealMind is of the same opinion.  Check out his blog article here and also have a look at packetpushers.net