Instant access to lab is crucial factor for success in career in overall and at CCIE Lab exam in particular. History of home labs for CCIE preparations For decades there was the only way to prepare for CCIE Lab examination, which was the access to real equipment. The luckiest engineers had access to such lab at their workplace. Usually such possibilities had employees of big telecom companies or IT system integrators. All other peoples, who desired to get CCIE, had to buy the used equipment on their own. Thanks to Ebay it was not too difficult, though it led to spending quite large amount of money. Therefore people, who were preparing for CCIE, used to gather together to share prices or refused this idea. Personally I had such lab at home a couple of years ago as well. It was very good time, as I had 4x Cisco 2600XM Series routers, 2x Cisco Catalyst 3550 switch, 1x Cisco Catalyst 2950 switch and 1x Cisco Catalyst 2958G L3. There was not only about preparation for certain exams, it was more about discovering the very exciting world of network technologies. Days and nights I was working in the lab to understand how things are working. But the time is passing by and things are changing. Current situation Today the networking and computing world is a bit another then 5-10 years ago, what simplifies the preparation for CCIE as well. In a simple terms it means that functions of such network elements as routers or switches are replaced by virtual machines VMs running a special software. And what is very good for everyone, who is preparing for CCIE, Cisco has such software. Such virtual images are fully functional so you are not limited by technologies supported by a certain platform. For real equipment you have to have a rack at hope, what is not easy to install. Then working equipment produces a lot of noise and consumes a lot of power. Virtual lab requires just your laptop or a server if you have big lab. You have it always with you, if it works at your laptop. So, what is it all about? There are two main solutions, which you can use. The first its version is called IOU-WEB and it was capable to launch Cisco IOU images. Cisco IOU Images are full feature Cisco L2 or L3 images, which feature sets are almost equal to real routers and multilayer switches. Unfortunately these images have some limitations. The link to the solution is here:. There you can find all the necessary information, documentation and downloads. One of the main advantages is that this lab can be launched just as one VM in any virtualization software Oracle VirtualBox, for example and you can use it wherever you want: at the work, at home, in train or plane, or even on the beach. This lab is always with you and depending on your laptop you can build very complex lab. What I can describe is the legacy IOW-WEB , which was and is popular right now. This tool is just VM, which can be launched in any virtualization tool. IOU-WEB works as a web application, so you will work with it using web browser. After you have launched IOU-WEB, you access its WEB GUI and get to the Laboratories lab. Here you can create new lab or chose previously created. Take a look on the possible example: You must enter the name and its description as the first step. Then you scroll down and come to the NETMAP field. In the NETMAP then you should the following connectivity. The next step is to add the necessary images to the instances, allocate interfaces, memory and names. You MUST configure RAM available per router. After launch you go to the diagram pane. First of all you see some chaos and red devices. Red color means that they are offline. Before you launch them it makes sense to structure devices according to the provided scheme. You see on the right side Wireshark images with play and stop buttons. You will use them to start and stop traffic capture in your network. Just click on the router and you will get into console. If you want, you can add later the new devices through the NETMAP just by changing the existing lab. Also you can delete it if you want. Conclusions This lab is very useful for all type of study. You can always launch it ad hoc and test lots of features not bothering your production network. Lessons learned In many cases this tool is just unreplaceable, as you always have access to it. But if you are Cisco employee or lucky enough, you can get this very powerful tool.
