rack adds or rack rental

I know this has been a topic many times over deciding on what to do concerning having a rack and buying rack time.

i'm in the same boat again and don't ever thing i have gotten out. My current rack is a pretty good size. currently it consists of

3640
3x 2500
2610
2620
4700
4500
2509
2x2900xl
3500xl
2950

This doesn't inlcude any of the servers

I have some plans to add a L3 switch of some sort, thinking on 2600xm, 1760 ( anything that will run 12.4), definitely need another 2509 or a 2511 and other necessary cards. the question being with all i have invested should i sell or add? I think my only reason i like the rack at home is that i can work on it anytime

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Comments

dtlokee

I think the most important attribute of a rack is having it available when you have time. Renting rack time 4-12 hours at a time seems to result in lots of wasted rack time because other things come up and what not. Even though I have racks full of equipment (2811's, 3825's, 3560's, 3750's) in the classrooms at work, I end up using my home rack the most with 4 3640's, 2 2611xm, and 2 3560's. I think you're pretty well off with what you have, you may want to add another 3640 or 2610xm so you can have 2 routers with 12.4, but with what you have you can do a large part of the bridging and switching. I wouldn't sell, you'll regret it when you want to practice and you don't have rack time until next week.

Also I wouldn't worry about building a rack for the CCIE to match the lab workbooks, it's too expensive. With what you have you can do most of it in a modified fashion. I placed too much emphsis on them and not enough on good old study time and rack time working through the labs in the different Cisco press books, and the Doc CD. The CCIE lab isn't about the hairbrained questions and solutions in some of the vendor workbooks as I had been led to believe, just application of the technology.

keenon

that was a solid answer

ITdude

Sounds like some sage advice!

Turgon

dtlokee wrote:

I think the most important attribute of a rack is having it available when you have time. Renting rack time 4-12 hours at a time seems to result in lots of wasted rack time because other things come up and what not. Even though I have racks full of equipment (2811's, 3825's, 3560's, 3750's) in the classrooms at work, I end up using my home rack the most with 4 3640's, 2 2611xm, and 2 3560's. I think you're pretty well off with what you have, you may want to add another 3640 or 2610xm so you can have 2 routers with 12.4, but with what you have you can do a large part of the bridging and switching. I wouldn't sell, you'll regret it when you want to practice and you don't have rack time until next week.

Also I wouldn't worry about building a rack for the CCIE to match the lab workbooks, it's too expensive. With what you have you can do most of it in a modified fashion. I placed too much emphsis on them and not enough on good old study time and rack time working through the labs in the different Cisco press books, and the Doc CD. The CCIE lab isn't about the hairbrained questions and solutions in some of the vendor workbooks as I had been led to believe, just application of the technology.

That's true. The vendor labs are useful but not in 'isolation'. Vendor lab providers and remote rack companies make a lot of money these days from repeat CCIE candidates. The lab is doable in 1- 3 attempts but for heightened success don't rely on vendor books.

Vendor books give you large scale scenarios to test what you know about a technology and how to fine tune routing updates but you should still be building smaller scale labs at home using examples from Solie, Huggan, Caslow, Doyle and CCO and using show and debugs so you fully understand the behavior of routing protocols et al.

Otherwise how will you know what routes you should *expect* to see when you connect partitioned area 0 with a virtual link? How will you know the three ways to bring the full mask of a loopback interface into OSPF?

You can learn all this at home with what you have with examples to build from Cisco Press and CCO.

Vendor labs give you tasks to accomplish but they will not teach you the technology or the appropriate steps to take to verify your solution is working properly. Im afraid this notion is lost on many candidates who throw money on vendor labs and rack hire, crash through as many practice labs as possible and fail the CCIE lab multiple times. You need to be coming into the IE preparation with a deep understanding of how routing and switching protocols work and you should be testing that at home on whatever rack you have using cisco press and CCO examples that teach the individual technologies.

That can mean a whole weekend devoted to just a handful of routers sometimes.

I have been following the CCIE since 2000, before rack vendors became big business candidates relied on many books and CCO examples to build at home.

Vendor workbooks have their place but they are not a replacement for that kind of study, you still need to do it to understand things properly.

Jeff Doyle - 'Our objective is to make CCIEs, not to make people who can pass the CCIE lab'

Vendor labbook providers would also agree it is not their job to teach you technology, you do that on your own time with what you have at home.

It's very evident on groupstudy who has got years of reading and experimentation under their belt and who hasn't. I'm afraid **** providers like T*** K*** have encouraged a generation of 'network engineers' to deny themselves a true learning experience.

Build out as many scenarios as you can at home with what you have.

MrD

Definitely keep your lab man. Having the gear in front of you gives you a much deeper understanding imo.

keenon

I have decided to keep adding i recently added a 2511 so now i can connect to all the devices and the 2509 is for sale if anyone needs one.

after giving the rack a bit more thought i decided to redesign the layout.. including as many technologies as possible.

i still have a switch and think i'll be adding some nics to the acs server to make it more interesting than it has to be. I'm up way to early to be online and doing this mess

Shot at 2007-08-09