Build a Cisco FTD + FMC Firewall Lab on EVE-NG — From Zero to First Access Policy

Building a Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) + Firepower Management Center (FMC) lab on EVE-NG is one of the highest-ROI things you can do as a network security engineer. It gives you a production-realistic environment to practice firewall policies, NAT, VPN, and IPS — all on commodity hardware. This guide walks through every step: hardware requirements, image import, FTD/FMC bootstrapping, device registration, and deploying your first access control policy with NAT. Hardware Requirements FMC is a resource hog — it needs 28GB RAM minimum (Cisco enforced; it won't boot with less). Here's what you need: Component Minimum Recommended RAM 32GB 64GB CPU 8 cores (VT-x/AMD-V) 16 cores Storage 200GB SSD free 500GB NVMe EVE-NG Community 5.0+ Pro 5.0+ OS Ubuntu 20.04 bare metal Bare metal Why so much RAM? FMCv = 28GB, each FTDv = 8GB. Add a management workstation and a couple of routers for traffic generation, and 32GB is tight for a single FTD setup. With 64GB you can run FMC + 2× FTD + supp