CCIE Collaboration: Home Lab Rack vs. Lab Rental?

Question:

For those people with CCIE home lab that’s based on CCIE Voice (like myself), do you guys plan on upgrading your home lab with the CCIE Collaboration equipment OR are you going to settle for the Lab Rentals (i.e. INE)?

INE Link: Update for CCIE Collaboration

Since I will NOT be ready for the CCIE Voice Lab by Feb. 13^th, 2014, I'm leaning more toward the Lab Rental option instead of upgrading my home lab.

Who out here will be taking the CCIE Voice Lab before the deadline (02/13/14)?

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Comments

aaron0011

The Collaboration lab equipment is pretty pricey. I'm not doing CCIE Collaboration but IIRC it uses 2900 series Gen 2 ISRs so the Routers and PVDM3s alone will be costly.

Side note, I don't even spec less then a 2921 with VSEC bundles due to the cost of adding PVDMs to a 2911. Why not pay the same price and get a bigger router with more SRST capacity.

shodown

I will be updgrading my lab. I have 1 3925 coming and I may get 1 more 29xx series router. I'm also looking at getting another server to split the apps up. The cheapest piece will be buying another NFR kit so I can have licensing on all my clusters. I'm not going to buy everything. I"m not going to buy a 3rd site with another ISRG2 and I"m not getting 3750's Very pricey and I don't know if the ROI is there for me.

ande0255

I was so hoping you'd have pics of your collaboration lab setup

I think if and when I get to that level I'd rent equipment, but I have an addiction to buying lab gear whenever I can afford to, I'm definitely a Cisco hoarder.

gorebrush

I really would love to do Voice work. After IE #1 maybe.

Will keep eyes on any progress you guys are making in this realm.

bobfromfpl

Whats the conversion from USD to SDC (Showdown Currency) so I can remotely use your lab once its operational?

shodown

bobfromfpl wrote: »

Whats the conversion from USD to SDC (Showdown Currency) so I can remotely use your lab once its operational?

LMAO

HIGH my power bills in the winter get close to 1K a month

bobfromfpl

Best I can offer is some Florida sun!

gorebrush

1K a month for power? Holy crap!!

Is that heating and power? Ours was like £300 ($450) this last QUARTER.

shodown

Just 3 months out of the year. We have very old infrastructure here for gas. I ran my labs and AC all summer and the utilities never went over 400

Searcher

I think you need to add server for ESXi and install some other VMs.

I do not think you need to replace your routers unless you are using very old routers (Not 2800 or 3800).

could you please list the devices that you have.

shodown

I have 3 2801's 1 2821, 1 3925 coming in the mail. I have 2 3560 8 port and 2 3550 24 ports. The reason on moving up to the newer 29/39xx routers if more for my consulting practice than the lab. I will use the gear in my lab. I also have a old dell sever with 12Gigs that can run the apps, but I would like to add a SME cluster, normal cluster, and a PSTN/ITSP cluster with the video apps.

Searcher

I think you have good devices to pass your exam. For sure it is better to have the exact rack that is used in the exam.

The diagram which Mark Snow has published is not the final diagram, you have to wait till the new version of the lab is active. but for the time being I can say you do not need to upgrade, specially that you have 3925 router.

samtm123

yes.. I think rent a lab would be perfect..

klampkin

@ aaron0011,
I know the IE Collab equip is very pricey. I thought IE Voice was expensive, definitely not compared to IE Collab.

shodown

@klampkim

yeah the price is way high. I wish I got mine done around a year ago. I kept dragging A55. This new one is expensive, and I expect the vendors to raise prices accordingly. The new lab starts tomorrow. I wonder who's brave enough to try it out.

klampkin

@ Shodown,

Speaking about ROI, I wish i was more aggressive with my IE Voice studies, than i could have sat for the IE Voice Lab and passed it before the deadline. We all know that putting together the IE Voice home lab was not cheap.

I think i am just going to stick with the INE tokens for now.

You get 500 tokens with the ALL ACCESS PASS subscription.

klampkin

ande0255 wrote: »

I was so hoping you'd have pics of your collaboration lab setup

I think if and when I get to that level I'd rent equipment, but I have an addiction to buying lab gear whenever I can afford to, I'm definitely a Cisco hoarder.

@ande0255,

LOL! Yep I wish I was posting my collaboration lab setup too.

The lab rentals are definitely cheaper, nothing beats setting up your own lab from scratch.

klampkin

shodown wrote: »

Just 3 months out of the year. We have very old infrastructure here for gas. I ran my labs and AC all summer and the utilities never went over 400

Wow! That's mad expensive.

Last year during the summer it was especially hot when running my lab equipments. Plus living in South Central Texas did not help.

shodown

I actually want all of my lab gear out my house. I'm thinking about putting it in a basement and running a L2TP connection upstairs so I only have a switch/router and phones. If I was making enough money I would have it all in a data center Somewhere. This stuff is not easy on the eyes.

gorebrush

I work for an outsourcing firm. If I could get my lab hosted for free whilst I study that would be nice. I could have it on 24/7 then

klampkin

shodown wrote: »

I actually want all of my lab gear out my house. I'm thinking about putting it in a basement and running a L2TP connection upstairs so I only have a switch/router and phones. If I was making enough money I would have it all in a data center Somewhere. This stuff is not easy on the eyes.

Wow! Datacenter. If you want to go that route... you should checkout COLO in your area that might be cheaper. Maybe you can rent some rack space.

So i wonder how many people took the COLLAB IE Yesterday.

sieff

Hi Shodown,

Do you find 12G is enough to run the 12 VM's in the lab topology? Also, if anyone has experience with the Dell 1950 PowerEdge can you give an idea of the noise level and power usage. The 1950 seems to be fairly priced, but I'm unsure if a Desktop type Tower-Server would be better. They are a bit more pricey..

shodown

12G is enough for me to run CUCM PUB/SUB, UCCX, Presence with no problems. I will need something much mower powerful to run SME, TMS and VCS. The Dell 1950 is really loud, I would look for other gear if you need it to be quiet. My next server will be a Cisco M220M3. Those are really quiet and are powerful.

Flyingput

Let's use 2GB memory per server. We don't need a very powerful platform to run these VMs. I sat in both RTP & SJC. Presence & UCCX servers were always very slow. So practice on slow servers in home lab to avoid any surprise in the real lab. Also I used a Pentium D PC as my student PC. I was happy to see the real lab PC was faster.

29xx and PVDM3 are required but I doubt if questions will really involve them. For most parts, 2851 & PVDM2 should be fine. It's still early for Collab lab. Later there will be more and more candidates sharing what they saw/hated/loved....whatever.

Good luck to all!

sieff

I'm glad that I didn't go with a DELL PowerEdge. I choose to go with a small form factor server. I purchased a GIGABYTE BRIX i5 for a fairly decent price and 16GB RAM. It's sufficient to run CUCM Pub & Sub, Unity Connection, IM & Presence and UCCX all at the same time - slight performance hit, but nothing to major. In order to run all the sites in the lab topology I will need another small form factor solution. I'm considering a Shuttle PC or HP mini-PC with 32GB of RAM or some other SFF, like a Intel NUC - depending on how everything prices out.

The biggest plus I can see with this gear is space, no significant hit in electric and its very, very quiet. The most power consumption I'm seeing is from my 48-Port POE switch, which I intend to replace with a 3750 8-port. A quiet lab environment with no huge electric bill increase was most important to me. Unfortunately, my current employer doesn't provide a lab environment; so this works for now.

The next major cost is the ISR G2 router for CME. I think CME is going to be important on the lab, so I want to make sure I run the same versions of code in the blueprint. Also, being able to use IOS media resources with PVDM3 for video conferencing will be good to get a lot of hands-on with as well.

Looking at the topology and the content for the CCIE Collab written, there's really a lot of avenues that the lab exam could take.

pitviper

Home lab all the way for me.

I picked up a 3rd 2911 off ebay a few weeks ago – So I’m just about squared away with hardware for now. Sticking with a couple of 3560-POE switches as there’s no good reason to buy a 3750X (I doubt stacking is a testable subject). Other than that, I already have 2x 9971s, 4x 7965s, and a bunch of 7961s as well as CUE (on an ISM-SRE-300), and 2 cisco UCS C200m2 servers. I’m hoping to get my hands on another CUCM NFR license kit for the 2nd cluster.

will_a

Sorry for dredging up an old thread, but...

I'm not entirely familiar with the new 2900/3900 licensing. In terms of a home collaboration lab, are you good license-wise buying them from ebay sans extra licensing like with the older gear? I'm okay with buying the new gear but don't want to have to license personal lab gear.

Roy4USA

Building your own CCIE Collaboration rack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfXqy3HJu5M

will_a

I appreciate the link Roy. That was really informative. I didn't notice any reference to the new 2900/3900 licensing though. Ideally my lab would match INE's as closely as possible, but I'm a little concerned about the additional licensing costs.

shodown

You will need the voice licensing for the gateways. You can find gateways on ebay with the licences already installed. They will cost a few hundred extra dollars. Also for version 9 cisco only gives you 60 days to work on CUCM before it locks you out. There are ways around this, and ebay is a good start for that.

INE's rack is pretty much going to be same thing.