Opinions on these kits?

MJK9550 · September 2016

Are these CCNA certification kits worth it from certificationkits.com?

Been debating on getting one to lab at home with and get more familiar with the stuff.

Thanks for your thoughts!

clarson · September 2016

certification kits is a top notch kit builder. They have good products, excellent customer service, and they guarantee it all. You get a premium product but you pay a premium price also. So, I'm not so sure if there is good value there. You get a lot, but pay a lot too.

I'd sell you the same hardware for half that. But, I don't include any of those "additional included items". You have to decide if those "additional included items" are worth half the cost of the lab. Or, if you'd like to save money by not purchasing those items and/or spending it on different study materials.

CertifiedMonkey · September 2016

It's cheaper to piece together a lab on ebay. I was looking at certificationkits.com too but decided to just buy everything through ebay. I was able to get 3 x 2811 and 2 x 2960 + cables + rack for ~$450. Still haven't bought the HWIC's though.

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IT-Base on eBay is the person that I bought from. Both switches did have an old version of IOS (12 something?) but I talked to them about it and they fixed it with a newer version pretty quickly.

Honestly, even though I have a lab, I prefer using Boson NetSim 11 for the CCENT/CCNA labs. I know.. go ahead and roll your eyes. Powering everything up just to do a simple lab (like RoAS, creating VLANs, etc) is inconvenient and extremely noisy!! If I could go back in time, I wouldn't have bought the lab for the CCNA.
PT and NetSim is all that is needed. Might be worth it for higher studies though. Just my .02.

JTN · September 2016

I found this kit on Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IPQUNUI/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A6OQFKFZO3PJK

Its reasonable priced and should be sufficient for CCNA

james43026 · September 2016

I agree that building your own lab saves you a lot of money. Most of the premade kits can be put together for a healthy portion less than what they sell for. Especially if you take the time to find good deals. On Ebay, I recommend the seller, network hardware depot. Everything comes with a 1 year warranty. And out of the 7 pieces of equipment I've purchased from them. Not a single one has had an issue.

JTN · September 2016

Thanks for the tip on where to buy routers and switches. Was able to get it a bit cheaper then purchasing the kit.

GmvProject · October 2016

How much did you end up spending for your kit?

Koolster · October 2016

I would go with UNL, it doesn't take much resources and it will last you till CCIE if you desire.

koz24 · October 2016

Koolster wrote: »

I would go with UNL, it doesn't take much resources and it will last you till CCIE if you desire.

Unetlab is great. There is also VIRL too. Both are great options but I prefer VIRL since it's an official product and I don't have to go hunt for grey-area IOU images and those sort of things. $150-200 a year is a drop in the bucket for what you get.

Ideally you will still want physical switches for L2 work, but for L3 go with VIRL or UNL all the way.

For CCNA though-- I would go all virtual. Why? Because everything you need can be virtualized and all pre-made CCNA kits are only good for CCNA. Sometimes they'll sell you really cheap equipment good enough for the CCNA but you won't be able to use it for CCNP or CCIE. So it's not future-proof is what I'm saying. Getting one of these cheapo kits makes sense only if you are 100% sure you will not go further than CCNA AND you want, for some reason, to have hands on experience with equipment you probably wont see in production anyway.

pevangel · October 2016

Don't waste your money on those kits. Save it for a decent server and switches.

Packet Tracer for CCNA
GNS3/ESXi/VIRL and physical switches for CCNP/CCIE

Opinions on these kits?

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