TL:DR Juniper have been kind enough to release vJunos-Switch as a free product.

If you’re here then you probably want to skip to the chase of finding out how to run this on a Proxmox Server, so let’s get started in installing and running vJunos-switch on Proxmox.

 

Download the .qcow2 image from https://support.juniper.net/support/downloads/?p=vjunos

Note: change the file name where appropriate below if a newer version is available.

1) SSH into your Proxmox server.

2) Create a qcow directory in /var/lib/vz/template

mkdir /var/lib/vz/template/qcow

3) Upload the .qcow2 image to /var/lib/vz/template/qcow (sFTP/SCP)

4) Create the VM config file, you’ll need to find the next available VM ID on the host. For me that was 120 but you should check.

touch /etc/pve/qemu-server/120.conf

5) Assign the .qcow2 image to the VM, you’ll need to adjust local-zfs to whatever datastore you wish.

cd /var/lib/vz/template/qcow/
qm importdisk 120 vjunos-switch-23.1R1.8.qcow2 local-zfs

 

6) Replace the config of the previously-created 120.conf

nano /etc/pve/qemu-server/120.conf

Contents:

 

args: -smbios type=1,product=VM-VEX -chardev socket,id=serial0,port=7890,host=0.0.0.0,server=on,wait=off,telnet=on -device isa-serial,chardev=serial0
boot: order=virtio0
cores: 4
cpu: host
memory: 8192
meta: creation-qemu=7.2.0,ctime=1682364130
name: vjunos-switch-2
net0: virtio=FA:BB:50:F5:DD:C1,bridge=vmbr0,firewall=1
net1: virtio=3E:4E:80:80:15:45,bridge=vmbr0,firewall=1
net2: virtio=66:E9:23:49:6F:C6,bridge=vmbr0,firewall=1
net3: virtio=FE:B6:81:8F:85:EE,bridge=vmbr0,firewall=1
net4: virtio=46:22:4C:F2:AB:50,bridge=vmbr0,firewall=1
numa: 0
ostype: l26
scsihw: virtio-scsi-single
smbios1: uuid=b60b0b27-593c-42fd-a2ac-a8702cb0415e
sockets: 1
vga: none
virtio0: local-zfs:vm-120-disk-0,iothread=1,size=32524M
vmgenid: 0b30be1d-92b6-443c-a416-725dbcfa14d5

7) Power up the VM, and then telnet to localhost port Start VM and, from the Proxmox Host, telnet to localhost on 7890

It’ll take a couple minutes for Junos to fully boot and there will be some inevitable messages that look like errors, but you should eventually get to the cli prompt.