Hardware for home Labs R&S (using UnetLab, IOU WEB...)

alaberto

[FONT=&quot]hello, [/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]I have any doubts about what hardware will be appropriate for practice with the labs for ccie r&s. I read various post, in this and another forums, and in spite of more or less be clear (or so I think) It would be good to know your opinion about the processor mainly, I had thought in:[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2623 v4 (10M Cache, 2.60 GHz)[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Intel® Xeon® Processor E3-1275 v5 (8M Cache, 3.60 GHz)[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-1630 v4 (10M Cache, 3.70 GHz)[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]ARK | Comparar productos Intel®[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]With this CPUs I will have a minimun of 32GB de RAM[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]Do you think that it would be "enough" for a large scenarios with between 20-30 devices? [/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]Any suggestion or advice do not hesitate to tell me please[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]Thanks in advanced, regards.[/FONT][FONT=&quot] [/FONT]

fredrikjj

Some kind of 4 core with hyperthreading, like those Xeons, and 32 GB of RAM should work just fine, but if you are building a server dedicated to this I would focus on making it low power and low noise over raw performance so that you can keep it running 24/7. Most of your practice will not involve 20+ routers, and it's convenient to get home and log in to routers that are already running instead of having to power on a server, and then boot the routers, etc.

Virtual routers (especially csr1000v - I don't use IOSv, but I imagine that it's similar), use very little CPU when idle, and they are basically idle during your lab time since you are not sending any significant amount of traffic. So even though it's recommended to have a minimum of 1 CPU per router, that's really only relevant during startup. If the routers do not have their own dedicated CPU, it's more or less required to boot them two or three at time, letting those reach their idle state before booting the next ones, etc. If you have some kind of high end 32 core server or whatever, you can likely just boot everything at once, but that's a lot of money for something that is just a minor improvement at the end of the day.

koz24

I'd also like to add that from what I've read, a solid state drive will GREATLY improve load times and performance of VIRL. Of course I'm assuming you are in fact talking about VIRL. In that case a bare metal install on a SSD is the way to go.

koz24

Oops, didn't see the Unetlab part. Yeah, that should be enough for UNL IOU. You should really use VIRL tho.

spiderjericho

koz24 wrote: »

Oops, didn't see the Unetlab part. Yeah, that should be enough for UNL IOU. You should really use VIRL tho.

Why are you advising him to use the paid product versus free? What's the use case or benefit of using VIRL for CCIE?

EANx

It seems the orchestration is better with VIRL than the free versions. Those hours of setting up a lab can add up. For someone who wants to sim small networks, the free versions might be a better option but being able to use autonetkit, have an already present traffic generating container with Ostinato and the ease of importing pre-setup networks is a definite advantage. VIRL isn't free (although it is pretty cheap and it doesn't support serial links but it's become a pretty solid product with a lot of features.

koz24

What EANx said. I'd also rather pay $200-300 and support an official product than feel guilty about using IOU images. Cisco does not release those, btw. Most of them are leaked or stolen from Cisco and quite a few of them aren't stable. So you have to find the stable ones and stay up to date because new, more stable ones, are "released" and then you have to update your topologies, etc.

spiderjericho

Why not just charge for IOU then?

Seems to be more light weight, better switching functionality and what they use on the actual lab exam.

koz24

spiderjericho wrote: »

Why not just charge for IOU then?

Seems to be more light weight, better switching functionality and what they use on the actual lab exam.

Good question. I believe they do charge for it, just in the form of an online lab that uses IOU. You are limited to a number of devices and it's not very popular(I don't even remember the name of it) because everyone just pirates IOU via Google.

koz24

Found it. It's called CCIE Lab Builder. 1000 bucks gets you 500 hours and you have to use it within 12months.

https://learningnetworkstore.cisco.com/cisco-ccie-lab-builder

EANx

There's also a $300 for 100 hrs option.