Appliance Vs Software based routers

Thu Aug 5 18:32:25 UTC 2010

On Wednesday, August 04, 2010 11:06:22 am Greg Whynott wrote:
> it works,  i see folks creating networks of hosts under ESXi protected by an ASA instance.. not for production.    I'm sure its not legal but Cisco doesn't seem to have a strong stand on it,  I'd think as long as you are using it for educational use and not commercial,  they may not care a whole bunch.  

Much like Juniper's stance on Olive, perhaps?

> What you can not do while emulating ASA is use encryption,  no VPNs or otherwise.  this is due to the fact the ASA units use hardware encryption, when the OS makes calls to the controller,  it isn't there..

ASA, yes, but older PIX doesn't; google for 'frankenpix' to see more. 

Cisco used lots of embedded x86 where it made sense to do so (lots of places: LocalDirector, Content/Cache Engines, PIX, SwitchProbe, IPTV, MCS, and others). 