Official CCIE Build Your Home Lab Thread

aldous

keenon wrote: »

I have had my share of L1 and L2 issues with dynamips, as noted power is the key. my rack is built to 360 spec the cost saved on buying routers was easily shifted toward buying switches. i had a real rack for many years when the opp came to reduce space, heat, power and other misc issues that can arise i gave it a shot. there are pics of my lab posted like anyone who has a rack.

the one thing i do love about it is that you can build custom lab topo. I have one that is 17 routers purely for testing on 1 pc.

here is one of the many i have built

This is the reason i moved from a physical lab to a virtulised one. i have 3xsun quad nics going to four 3550's so i can flip between lab setups simply by making software changes rather then mucking about with cabales!

keenon

aldous wrote: »

This is the reason i moved from a physical lab to a virtulised one. i have 3xsun quad nics going to four 3550's so i can flip between lab setups simply by making software changes rather then mucking about with cabales!

exactly

Forsaken_GA

aldous wrote: »

This is the reason i moved from a physical lab to a virtulised one. i have 3xsun quad nics going to four 3550's so i can flip between lab setups simply by making software changes rather then mucking about with cabales!

Then you're not doing it right on real gear. It's fairly trivial to take a rack cabled to INE's standards, for example, and change the topology entirely around. All the switches have links to each other, all the routers with ethernet ports can be moved around simply by changing their vlans, and the frame relay topology can be altered simply by changing DLCI's. The only time I have to mess with cables is when I'm upgrading a piece of gear and need to replace it.

The only place the virtual setup has an advantage is if you want to add devices. Otherwise, I can flip my setup around to whatever I want solely through software changes and without touching a cable.

Where the physical equipment has an advantage is doing that kind of topology wrangling is an actual skill you will need to possess in the real world. Moving topologies in the real world doesn't involve using a GUI to establish links between your routers, or editing a map file.

Mrock4

My only gripe with dynamips was that sometimes I'd encounter a weird problem, and not know whether or not it was the software, an actual IOS bug, or a misconfiguration. At least with real hardware I can eliminate one of those issues.

It does have it's place though, I think- I still use dynamips for quick concept testing before we deploy new gear..mostly to make sure my layer 3 config is spot on. We're actually planning on dedicating a server at work to dynamips, for that very purpose.

keenon

Mrock4 wrote: »

My only gripe with dynamips was that sometimes I'd encounter a weird problem, and not know whether or not it was the software, an actual IOS bug, or a misconfiguration. At least with real hardware I can eliminate one of those issues.

It does have it's place though, I think- I still use dynamips for quick concept testing before we deploy new gear..mostly to make sure my layer 3 config is spot on. We're actually planning on dedicating a server at work to dynamips, for that very purpose.

I built one at work for that very purpose. Nothing is worst than not really having an actual test network

Mrock4

Absolutely. We have a replica production network setup, but I'd like to integrate dynamips so we can have more flexibility. It'll be a lot easier to add in customer sites and whatnot without changing hardware...I know, I'm lazy.

Forsaken_GA

It was an easier sell for to use IOU at work for the mockups. It's a hell of alot easier to simply distribute a VM image and tell folks to boot it and teach them how to edit the map file than it is to dick around with dynamips.