How much will a CCIE home lab that can also be used for consulting work cost?

ghost2q

I want to get a CCIE home lab for studying but also hoping I can use it to do some consulting work. How much will a good CCIE home lab that is capable for me to use it for consulting work cost?

ColbyG

When you say "consulting work", what do you expect to be able to do with your lab? If you're talking PoC stuff, you should focus the more important aspects of starting a consulting business, like getting deciding what services you're going to offer and building a customer base. PoC is a very small part of consulting and you can typically do it with less hardware than an IE lab will have (not to mention much different hardware, like ASAs).

As for cost, it depends what you're going to purchase. Figure out what you want and look up pricing on Ebay.

alxx

May I suggest to just get your ccna first then worry about an expensive lab (or not) when you know you want to continue with it.

What may be a good current ccie lab, may not be by the time you get around to doing your ccie
depending on how long it takes you.

A good research exercise is instead of asking what to buy is to go and work out from the available resources , cisco , cisco learning network , techexams, certzone etc
what would be suitable for a lab.

Then work out the amount of equipment needed then post a list in a suitable part of the forum and ask for advice. i.e do some home work first

Forsaken_GA

Colby is largely correct. It all really depends on what kind of consulting you're going to be doing.

Scott Morris is famous for his very large lab - Lab Overview

Which he uses for studying and doing PoC work for his consulting clients.

There's no turnkey solution for this. What equipment you need is going to depend on what you need to emulate, which will be driven by your clients. How much it'll cost will largely be determined by your own ability to hunt down bargains.

shodown

I think this varies on your skill and from the questions you are asking I don't think the skill is there. I have a makeshift lab with various voice applications a few phones and a few sites setup. I've been using it more for deal on sites like freelance rather than studying for the damn exam. The key is to find something you are good at and like to do. Then you will figure out how to make money from it. Having a lab is good, and using it as proof of concept is great.