Here's my situation: I hate firewalls, load balancers, routers etc... want to root em all!Anyway, I can't buy em all, and a lot of people think that it's dumb to buy them anyway. Why? So the common wisdom goes, they all run some kind of linux, so just analyse linux for some flaws. People even say that testing against snort is as good as testing against a Cisco IDS device that might run snort or something like it....So here's what I want to do: I want to at least recreate the hardware conditions of a network device, and match that up to firmware and a pre-flashed device? Objective Question How would I go about about ensuring that the hardware environment I create with a virtual machine accurately mimics the real deal so that I might reverse engineer the system (using dynamic analysis to find binary flaw)? Extra questions in case you decide to give me advice Am I making this a more complicated problem than it needs to be? Is this something that can be objectively proven? Ultimately is it preferable to RE the physical device? 
How to accurately virtualize bespoke hardware?
hardware;virtualizers