For testing and research purposes, I know it is possible to emulate Cisco devices (with dynamips) and Juniper ones (via an "Olive", a FreeBSD based system running on qemu) in a GNS3 environment.
Is it possible to emulate other vendor devices (like Brocade ones) in GNS3 or else ?
Best Answer
What I recommend is to setup a virtualized environment. Either through Vmware workstation or preferably ESXi with vSphere if you have a server to spare. That gives you a very flexible solution.
That makes it easy to run inter vendor labs and you can connect them through the VM network which makes it simple to setup. I have a lab like this now and it's hosted by a friend so a VPN in to a box he setup (virtual) which is my GW. Then I can configure vSphere and anything I like and run it on the server.
If you have a powerful laptop which 8GB RAM or more you can run a lot of stuff directly on your laptop. Most of these things are RAM heavy but not that heavy for the CPU.