Here are a few things that I learned:
- Installation on bare metal is a pain
- it is totally possible and is doable, but installing on a free esxi host is much easier
- interfaces get tricky unless your box matches the base config exactly
- ESXi is your friend
- if you have an old PowerEdge 710 server laying around you might as well run ESXi on it an load the pre-configured OVA
- no messing with linux interfaces in the server
- just have to build the back end networking in ESXi
- Don't use the minimum required RAM
- purchased the 30 node license, but quickly ran out of 32GB (only ran 14 nodes)
- maxed out the server at 128GB and I can max out my node limit
- Cisco's community links don't work (as of 7/6/16)
- all of the google results redirect you to a parked domain
- this makes troubleshooting and tips a pain if something gets screwed up
- community forum exists, but it hard to get to threads directly at the moment
- YOU CAN EXPORT TO GNS3!
All in all I think its great that you can run multiple types of devices (NXOS, IOS, IOSXE, switches). If you have someone paying for it I would get it, but GNS3 will still be my personal go-to software.
Here is a link to Cisco's documentation: Click Here
If you'd like some detailed info on doing a Bare Metal install (on a poweredge server): Click Here
