For popular network vendors (Cisco CSR1000v, Palo Alto, Fortinet, Arista), the EVE-NG team maintains a library of ready-to-use images.
EVENG supports two node types for QEMU:
A Python script that scrapes the official EVENG database and downloads images via curl with checksum verification. eveng qemu images download better
git clone https://github.com/akira6592/eve-ng-image-tool
cd eve-ng-image-tool
./download.py --list # Shows all available images
./download.py --get "Cisco vIOS L2"
❌ “Node stuck at ‘starting’”
→ Run fixpermissions again.
→ Check folder ownership (unl user?).
❌ “No disk found”
→ Image must be named exactly virtioa.qcow2 or hda.qcow2.
→ Use qemu-img info image.qcow2 to confirm format. For popular network vendors (Cisco CSR1000v, Palo Alto,
❌ “qemu-system-x86_64: not found”
→ EVE‑NG bare metal missing KVM packages – reinstall eve-ng package.
/opt/unetlab/wrappers/unl_wrapper -a fixpermissions
🚫 Common mistake: Forgetting this step = “Permission denied” errors when starting nodes. /opt/unetlab/wrappers/unl_wrapper -a fixpermissions
Always verify licensing before downloading or using vendor images.
If your EVENG server has no direct internet access (common in corporate labs), use Docker:
docker run --rm -v /opt/unetlab/addons/qemu:/data alpine wget http://example.com/image.zip -P /data