NOVA Network Lab
A datacenter on your desktop.
Reproduce a real network on your desktop: real routers and firewalls, WAN links with real delay and loss, and a simulated datacenter around them.
The app, rebuilt for the browser.
Six scenes from the real app. Pick one, click around, cut a wire.
Reproduce a real network, from the WAN down to the cable. NOVA boots real Cisco, FortiGate and Linux systems on its own engine, runs several sites at once and links them over WAN circuits with real delay, jitter, loss and fibre distance. Around them it simulates power, UPS, cooling and cabling. Cut a cable or a WAN link and the ping really fails.
R1>show ip interface brief Interface IP-Address OK? Method Status Protocol GigabitEthernet0/0 10.0.12.1 YES NVRAM up up GigabitEthernet0/1 10.99.77.254 YES NVRAM up up GigabitEthernet0/2 unassigned YES NVRAM administratively down down GigabitEthernet0/3 unassigned YES NVRAM administratively down down Loopback0 1.1.1.1 YES NVRAM up up R1>ping 10.0.12.2 Type escape sequence to abort. Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 10.0.12.2, timeout is 2 seconds: !!!!! Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 1/2/4 ms
Welcome to Virtual PC Simulator, version 0.8.3 Press '?' to get help.
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Six live demos. Tap one to play it in the app above.
Overview
- Role
- Creator
- Year
- 2026
- Platforms
- Windows · macOS
- Status
- Private preview · v0.7
NOVA is a desktop network lab I built from the engine up to reproduce real networks, not toy ones. You draw the topology, boot real devices and work on them through their own consoles: Cisco IOSv routers and switches, FortiGate firewalls, Kali and other Linux guests, and lightweight VPCS hosts. Other virtual disks and installers can be imported with the right hardware profile.
The WAN behaves like a WAN. Every link can carry one-way delay, jitter, loss, a bandwidth cap and a nominal fibre-route distance, applied to live traffic, with counters that separate forwarding, queueing and drops. Several labs run side by side as separate sites, placed on an offline world map down to the building, floor and room, and linked to each other: routers in two labs form OSPF over that link and recover when it is cut.
It does not sit on top of GNS3 or another lab tool. NOVA orchestrates QEMU itself, keeps every device’s working disk separate from its original image, and runs its own Ethernet fabric that forwards real frames between guests. Add 45 ms of fibre or a split pair, and the ping in the console shows it.
Around the network, NOVA simulates the datacenter it lives in: racks and PDUs with exact outlets, UPS units with battery runtime and transfer behaviour, cooling with a thermal model, gas fire suppression, patch panels, named Cisco transceivers and server profiles such as the Dell R350 and HPE DL380. Run a drill, from a cooling failure to a utility outage, watch the room react, then restore only what you broke.
Down at layer 1, the RJ45 workbench lets you strip the jacket, arrange the conductors in T568A or T568B, crimp both plugs and test them. The wiremap tester catches misplaced conductors, shorts and split pairs, and a bad cable really breaks the link.
Every build is verified before it ships. The current source passes 1,285 of 1,285 automated checks, Windows releases come as an installer and a portable app with published checksums, and a native build for Apple silicon is in progress.
8 things it does well.
- Real consoles: Cisco IOSv and IOSvL2, FortiGate, Kali and VPCS
- WAN delay, jitter, loss, bandwidth and fibre distance on live traffic
- Several labs at once, linked as sites on an offline world map
- Its own QEMU orchestration and Ethernet fabric, no GNS3
- Simulated racks, PDUs, UPS, cooling and fire suppression
- Incident drills: cooling, PDU or utility loss, then a selective restore
- 2D topology and 3D datacenter on the same devices and cables
- RJ45 workbench with a wiremap tester, plus packet capture with PCAP export
Built with
- Electron
- React
- Three.js
- QEMU
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- xterm.js
- noVNC