Lab Environments Part 3: Network Emulation Platforms - EVE-NG, GNS3, and pnetlab

Part 2 covered the hypervisor layer, Proxmox, ESXi, VMware Workstation, that most of what follows runs on top of. This part covers what most people actually picture when they say “network lab”: real vendor images (IOSv, vIOS, ASAv, FortiGate-VM, and similar) wired together in a GUI topology editor, running as VMs under one of those hypervisors.

EVE-NG.

The platform most existing guides on the internet still describe is no longer the platform you’d actually download in 2026, and that gap is worth spelling out plainly rather than repeating stale advice. EVE-NG’s free Community Edition, the 63-node build most write-ups reference, reached end-of-support and end-of-life in June 2026 and was not carried forward into version 7. Version 7’s free path is now “Freemium” mode: running the Professional ISO without a license caps you at 7 nodes, with unlimited VPCS instances but admin-only access. The paid Professional tier costs 150 EUR, unlocks up to 1024 nodes and added roles for multi-user access, and the license is tied to a single VM instance or physical machine, with periodic internet checks required to keep it validated.

None of that changes what EVE-NG actually does well: it runs as its own VM (itself a guest on the Part 2 hypervisor layer), and its topology editor and lab-sharing features are generally considered the most polished of the emulation platforms, which is exactly the audience, teams and classrooms, that the 2026 licensing changes are aimed at monetizing.

pnetlab.

Forked from EVE-NG’s Community Edition around 2019, well before the 2026 EOL, pnetlab kept adding Professional-tier features on top of that fork for free: Docker support, a lab store for sharing topologies, no node limit. EVE-NG’s position is that this is an unauthorized fork built on proprietary code; pnetlab’s position is that the original UNetLab BSD license permits forking. That disagreement is unresolved and worth stating rather than picking a side on. What’s changed in 2026 is the context around it: with Community Edition gone and Freemium capped at 7 nodes, pnetlab’s free, unlimited-node offering is a meaningfully more attractive option than it was when EVE-NG Community was still a live alternative.

GNS3.

An independent project with its own lineage (Dynamips-based originally, for real Cisco IOS images rather than the IOSv virtual appliances the other two rely on), and still actively developed as of mid-2026, with commits to its core repositories in July 2026. It ships as a client application plus a separate GNS3 VM, a prebuilt appliance bundling QEMU, Dynamips, and Docker helpers, available for VirtualBox, VMware Workstation and Fusion, ESXi, and Hyper-V, currently at version 2.2.60. GNS3 carries none of the licensing complexity EVE-NG introduced in 2026: it’s free and open, with paid options limited to commercial vendor appliance packs sold through its own marketplace, not the core platform.

Comparing the three in practice.

GNS3’s Dynamips heritage makes genuine, non-virtualized Cisco IOS images usable in a way EVE-NG and pnetlab don’t emphasize, since both of those lean on IOSv-style virtual appliances instead. EVE-NG’s interface and multi-user lab-sharing are generally regarded as more polished, which matters more for classroom or team use than for a single engineer’s home lab. pnetlab trades that legal ambiguity for the most permissive node limits of the three, for free.

None of these three ships the vendor images that make any of them useful. That’s the same bottleneck named in Part 1: the platform choice here is secondary to whether you can actually obtain an IOSv, vIOS, or FortiGate-VM image to run inside it. Part 4 covers the alternative that sidesteps that problem for one vendor specifically, by shipping the images built in.