Choosing a Virtual Networking Environment

Background:
I'm 18 months into my first helpdesk job, self-taught (homelab) with no certs, and an amazing opportunity has fallen into my lap at work.
I work at a very small MSP, and generally network design for our larger clients is outsourced to network engineers. It's known that I have an interest in networking and I've mentioned that I use GNS3 at home, so someone has thrown me a bone (or a live grenade) and asked me to take care of it.

Not releasing that I might be out of my depth, I agreed, thinking that it would be as easy as downloading the IOS images and configs from each of the routers and then jamming them into a GNS3 appliance. I quickly found out that there's more to life than 7200's and this was going to be a much bigger learning opportunity than I would have hoped for.

 

The job:

One of our larger clients would like to create a virtual networking environment, initially just for three of their routers. All three routers are Cisco ISR 4351/K9. Two are running IOS XE Version 15.5(3)S4b, and the other is 15.5(2)S3.

 

Ideas I have on how to achieve this, and what I think are the pros and cons:

• Have them purchase a Personal Cisco Modeling Labs license (Enterprise license is way out of budget)

  • Pro: This will almost certainly work
  • Pro: $199/year subscription will cost them less than if they were being billed for the time it took me to make this reddit post
  • Pro: It could be easier to deploy on their existing infrastructure than other solutions might
  • Con: I have never used this software before, only used my VIRL subscription to download IOS images
    
  • Con: I haven't been able to find any information on whether or not we can add Windows VMs to the topology
  • Con: This solution would not scale up to their entire network if they chose to do so in the future

 

• Use GNS3 (this comes with some questions as well as pros and cons)

  • ?? Is GNS3 capable of running the IOS XE images if we copied them from their physical devices?
  • ?? If not, will we just need to purchase a Cisco Modelling Labs license anyway?
  • Pro: I am familiar with this software (not an expert by any means, but an acceptable working knowledge)
  • Pro: Easily able to add computer VMs to the topology
  • Pro: It's free
  • Pro: Easily scales up to and beyond their actual network
  • Con: Less up-to-date community support available
  • Con: If anything goes wrong the buck stops with me.
  • Con: I don't even know if it's capable of emulating these routers

   

That's kind of where I'm at. If this is too long and you can't be bothered reading, I have some bit-sized questions that I haven't been able to find answers to

• Can GNS3 emulate ISR 4351/K9 routers if you can copy the IOS XE image from the physical device?
• Does the Cisco Modelling Labs Personal edition let you download VIRL images, or can they only be used within the modelling labs software?

 

Although I've been struggling to find the answers to these questions over the last 48 hours, it's been a great challenge so far and I'm grateful for the opportunity to push myself. Big thanks to this community in general, you've all taught me so much and kept me interested in networking despite my day job revolving almost entirely around Microsoft desktop support.