When I was studying for my CCNP, I had purchased a home lab to practice on. Now that I’ve been working on my CCIE studies, I decided that I wanted to invest in upgrading my lab as opposed to relying on rack rentals or Dynamips as I use the vendor workbooks in my studies. So last week, I ordered a whole bunch of routers to get my lab to a place where I could replicate both the Internetwork Expert and IP Expert lab setups. It’s not quite where I want it to be in terms of the switches. But it’s good enough for the time being until I can afford a few more layer 3 switches.
Here are a few photos of my lab.
I really should have taken a picture before I plugged in all of cables. Maybe when my lab moves to its new home in the basement (once it’s finished) I can take a picture sans-cables. Until then, here are the devices from top to bottom.
2- Catalyst 2950 switches with enhanced image (I eventually want to replace these with 3560s)
2- Catalyst 3550s w/ PoE
5- 2610XM routers
3- 3460 routers
1- 2522 router (frame relay switch)
3- 2501 routers (backbone routers)
1- 2511 router (access server)
For those that didn’t do the math, there are a total of 17 devices, which fills up my entire rack. So I am at capacity in more ways than one (both in the rack and on the access server). The happy sup rise was that all of this is able to run on a single 15 amp circuit. I was half expecting to blow the circuit as I was powering on the final 3-5 devices.
Now the only hard part is going to be keeping myself from buying either RockBand2 or Guitar Hero: World Tour. As long as I can do that, I should be able to get some good lab time in this winter. Speaking of which, we got our first snowflakes in the Twin Cities are of Minnesota today. Fall goes by way too fast.
