Qemu Images Download Better - Eveng

Would you like a ready-to-use bash script that automates downloading, converting, and setting up a specific QEMU image (e.g., Cisco vIOS or FortiGate) for EVE-NG?

Here’s a detailed, ready-to-use post for a blog, forum (like Reddit or EVE-NG Community), or internal knowledge base on downloading and using QEMU images with EVE-NG to improve workflows and avoid broken labs.

Stop using cp or rsync. Use qemu-img for everything: eveng qemu images download better

qemu-img info myimage.qcow2   # See virtual size, actual size, backing file
qemu-img resize myimage.qcow2 +10G  # Expand disk
qemu-img rebase -b baseimage.qcow2  # Use backing files for clones

Backing files are a game changer. You can have one master image and 10 nodes referencing it—saving terabytes of space.

For popular network vendors (Cisco CSR1000v, Palo Alto, Fortinet, Arista), the EVE-NG team maintains a library of ready-to-use images. Would you like a ready-to-use bash script that

EVE-NG (Emulated Virtual Environment — Next Generation) is a network emulator that runs virtual network devices inside QEMU/KVM and other hypervisors to build labs and topology simulations. QEMU images are the virtual-disk files used to run vendor IOS/IOS-XE/IOS-XR, NX-OS, PAN-OS, FortiOS, VyOS, Linux appliances, and other OSes inside EVE-NG. This guide exhaustively explains how to find, obtain, prepare, import, and troubleshoot QEMU images for EVE-NG, plus best practices and legal/security considerations.

Note: Licensing: many network OS images (Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto, Fortinet, etc.) are proprietary; you must have appropriate rights to use vendor images. This guide describes technical steps only and does not provide links to copyrighted images. Stop using cp or rsync

For engineers who manage multiple EVENG servers (e.g., CCIE rack rentals), manual downloads are impossible. Use Ansible:

- name: Ensure QEMU images are present on EVENG
  hosts: eveng_servers
  tasks:
    - name: Download Cisco IOSvL2 image
      get_url:
        url: "https://example.com/iosv-l2.zip"
        dest: "/tmp/iosv-l2.zip"
        checksum: "sha256:abc123..."
    - name: Unzip and move into place
      unarchive:
        src: "/tmp/iosv-l2.zip"
        dest: "/opt/unetlab/addons/qemu/"
        owner: root
        group: root
        mode: '0755'
    - name: Fix permissions
      command: /opt/unetlab/wrappers/unl_wrapper -a fixpermissions

Run once to populate all remote servers.

git clone https://github.com/slizhang/eve-ng_image_downloader
cd eve-ng_image_downloader
python3 downloader.py --list
python3 downloader.py --download cisco-iosv-15.6

Feature: Auto-creates folder structure (/opt/unetlab/addons/qemu/), verifies checksums, and sets correct permissions.

Websites like OSBoxes, LinuxImages.org, and TechGumbo offer pre-made Ubuntu, CentOS, and Windows QEMU images. However, always checksum the files (real md5sum or sha256).

qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O qcow2 vEOS-lab-4.28.0F.vmdk virtioa.qcow2