Enough equipment for CCNP & CCIE Lab?

ITtech2010

Hi all,

I just wanted to verify if I have enough equipment for both labs. I am trying to acquire my CCNP and CCIE within the next couple of yrs. I would like to in 2 yrs but i don't know how quick i'll be able too considering I am new to networking

My co-workers and I purchased a desktop pc with 3 quad nics 16gb of ram and 1TB hdd , Intel Core i7-2700K 3.5GHz processor

This is the current Cisco equipment we have

(3) 3560 Switches (2) 24-T (1) 48-T
(1) 3640 Router (Has multiple serial interfaces and could be used as our frame relay device)
(2) 2600 Router
(1) 2500 Router
(5) Pix 505E firewalls
(1) ASA5500 Firewall

We plan on installing Ubuntu and GNS3 on the pc. This will help us with creating a bunch of labs but I want to be sure I have enough physical device to complete everything just in case. Thanks.

Forsaken_GA

It depends on the models and IOS's you ahve available. That's more than enough for the CCNP. For CCIE, it depends on which track you're going to follow, but you'll probably need at least one more switch.

ITtech2010

Thanks for the feedback

Most likely our lab would be for the Routing and Switching exam. Would I still need one more router for our topology?

Forsaken_GA

ITtech2010 wrote: »

Thanks for the feedback

Most likely our lab would be for the Routing and Switching exam. Would I still need one more router for our topology?

Well if you're going to do GNS3 and bridge the GNS3 interfaces to the switches, then you don't need any routers, they can all be emulated. If you're going to do a full hardware lab, then you need many more routers, 8 to 12 total, depending on which vendor you're using

SubnetZero

For your CCNP you should be good, however CCIE is a little different. For starters you can lose the PIX and ASA's for the CCIE R&S since they aren't needed for this track. Also, you're going to need a minimum of four switches, preferably all 3560's.

Although you didn't specifically mention it are you planning on using GNS3? If so you won't need any physical routers since they will all be running inside GNS3. That being said you'll have a couple of different ways to integrate your physical Catalysts into GNS3.

The first method is to bind every virtual router interface – that need to be connected to a switch – to a dedicated physical interface on your host. Each dedicated interface then connect to a real switch port.

The second method is to create a 802.1Q trunk between your virtual network and a physical “breakout switch”. Each virtual router interface gets assigned to a VLAN (tagging occurs on the host). The breakout switch receives tagged traffic via the single physical trunk link and distributes the VLANs accordingly to real switches.


Note that if you plan to configure one of these method to study for your CCIE Routing & Switching, you will need about 12 connections from the GNS3 virtual routers to your real switches.

If you do decided to use a breakout switch this will bring the total amount of switches needed to five, however it has it's benefits.

Source:
Switching - GNS3

HTH

SubnetZero

One more thing you will want to make sure of is that you're running IOS 12.4(T) Advanced Enterprise Services on your routers and 12.2 Advanced IP Services on your Catalysts.

Cheers!

Turgon

ITtech2010 wrote: »

Hi all,

I just wanted to verify if I have enough equipment for both labs. I am trying to acquire my CCNP and CCIE within the next couple of yrs. I would like to in 2 yrs but i don't know how quick i'll be able too considering I am new to networking

My co-workers and I purchased a desktop pc with 3 quad nics 16gb of ram and 1TB hdd , Intel Core i7-2700K 3.5GHz processor

This is the current Cisco equipment we have

(3) 3560 Switches (2) 24-T (1) 48-T
(1) 3640 Router (Has multiple serial interfaces and could be used as our frame relay device)
(2) 2600 Router
(1) 2500 Router
(5) Pix 505E firewalls
(1) ASA5500 Firewall

We plan on installing Ubuntu and GNS3 on the pc. This will help us with creating a bunch of labs but I want to be sure I have enough physical device to complete everything just in case. Thanks.

Plenty of equipment to be going on with for now. Get it assembled and put some hours in with it. You will highlight any deficiencies as you go along and can invest from there. Spend 100 hours with what you have before throwing more money at it so you know you will put whatever you invest in to good use!

ITtech2010

Thanks for the feedback everyone. I appreciate it.

We're going to just use the 3560 Switches for our labs. Right now we have three but a co-worker has an extra 3560 at home that he will bring in to use for our labs. I will make a note of the IOS's that I would need.

We're going to connect our 4 switches via ethernet cables to the quad nic cards. Our quad cards have the trunk feature. Our Server will have Ubuntu 10.4 I believe. We will use GNS3 to emulate our routers. My manager and I decided to not use the pix as it's outdated. The rest of the routers will be kept to the side for now unless we feel the need to add it to our topology. I hope that answers your questions.

astrogeek

Sounds like you're doing exactly what I'm doing with my home lab, except I can't afford 3560's so I'm using 3550's until I can get a raise

What brand of quad NIC cards are you using and with what motherboard? If you need any tips on cabling this link might help.

Not sure if this matters, but I had trouble figuring out which NIC port matched up with what eth in Linux (Ubuntu), so what I ended up doing was shutting down all switch ports, configuring one cloud in GNS3 with all eth ports (eth0, eth1, eth2, etc), and one by one turning one on and I'd get a duplex error telling me what switch and what port it came from. I don't know if this is an issue with my quad NIC cards, or maybe it's a GNS3 limitation, but I have to set my router ports connecting to real physical switches to half duplex, (same on the switch or the error message will continue to repeat itself)

My lab is based on the CCIE topology but I'm only using it for CCNP right now, and also as a cheap terminal server to access my switches.

ITtech2010

astrogeek wrote: »

Sounds like you're doing exactly what I'm doing with my home lab, except I can't afford 3560's so I'm using 3550's until I can get a raise

What brand of quad NIC cards are you using and with what motherboard? If you need any tips on cabling this link might help.

Not sure if this matters, but I had trouble figuring out which NIC port matched up with what eth in Linux (Ubuntu), so what I ended up doing was shutting down all switch ports, configuring one cloud in GNS3 with all eth ports (eth0, eth1, eth2, etc), and one by one turning one on and I'd get a duplex error telling me what switch and what port it came from. I don't know if this is an issue with my quad NIC cards, or maybe it's a GNS3 limitation, but I have to set my router ports connecting to real physical switches to half duplex, (same on the switch or the error message will continue to repeat itself)

My lab is based on the CCIE topology but I'm only using it for CCNP right now, and also as a cheap terminal server to access my switches.

Hey Astro,

I think i used the adaptec cards from overstock.com. As for motherboard we used MSI P67A-C43 (B3) ATX Intel Motherboard with Intel Core i7-2600K 3.4GHz LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor and 1 TB hard drive. Should be a fast system. We just need to order the correct size power supply for our tower. Hopefully by next week we can have the server built.

Thank you for the link for cabling. I hope i can lay it out perfectly that way.

The other day I ended up racking the good routers and switches that we have because my co-worker wants to test out multicast. We use pim dense mode in our environment so we would like to use our labs for testing purposes as well as furthering our education respectively. This is the complete equipment that I have right now before we build our server for our gns3 lab.

Cisco 2600 (2)
Cisco 2500
Cisco 3640
Cisco 3725 (Just took this from our production because its no longer in use)
Cisco 3560 (3)

I also have a Cisco 2800 thats no longer in use for our NYC topology. I may end up pulling that after i confirm there's no ramifications for removing the router. I think it was linked to our old voicemail system but it does not have any ties to other routers in our environment. We upgraded our voicemail system to MD5 so hopefully that's an additional router I can add. You never could get enough routers to play around with and if for some reason GNS3/dynamips acts quirky we can use real equipment. Just have to get the right cabling to link all the hardware together. It should be fun and I can't wait. My company is mostly having me do spreadsheets right now calculating bandwidth for customers connectivity, using wireshark to identify multicast gaps and i do changes after hours.

Not sure how long it will take to complete this lab set up but I am hoping hardware wise it's good enough for ccnp. I plan on at least setting up access so i can use it from home for studies since i don't have switches.