Starting a Cisco Home Lab: Hardware and GNS3?

bsantiagotech

Good Morning Everyone.

I've got a couple of questions for the forum about starting a Cisco Home Lab.


1. If the goal is to be certified across the full stack of Cisco certs at the Associate level, is GNS3 a requirement? Or will a hardware lab suffice?


2. Any recommendations for good laptops to run GNS3 labs on?


Thanks!

dontstop

bsantiagotech wrote: »

1. If the goal is to be certified across the full stack of Cisco certs at the Associate level, is GNS3 a requirement? Or will a hardware lab suffice?

Do you mean doing the CCNA RS/SP/DC/Sec/etc all in succession? I would advise against that, from what I've been told it's a better idea to go CCNA -> CCNP -> CCNA {Stream of your choice} as it makes it easier once you have the CCNA & NP R&S fundamentals down.

I personally found that for ICND1 level that Packet Tracer was enough, for ICND2 there are a few topics which real hardware would benefit from. I think a healthy dose of mixing it up is really important too. I spent a lot of time in sims/GNS3/PT and found it very hard to relate to physical hardware once I was confronted with it (as I don't work with Cisco gear at the moment).