He had one hour left. One hour before the corporate audit team landed in his inbox.
Then, he dragged a Cisco vIOS image into the web GUI. Then a Juniper vMX. Then an Ubuntu cloud host. He connected them with virtual cables that glowed blue on his screen.
He tried GNS3. Too clunky. He tried Packet Tracer. Too limited. He needed something that could emulate a real Cisco router, a Palo Alto firewall, and a Linux server all at once, without begging for more RAM.
Leo’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. He’d heard the rumors about EVE-NG (Emulated Virtual Environment – Next Generation). It was the ghost in the machine—the tool that senior engineers whispered about. The one that could spin up a hundred nodes on a single server and make them sing.
He watched the progress bar crawl. 50%... 75%... 95%...
He clicked the green button.
But the lab he built kept crashing.
He smiled.