Building a home lab for the Wireless CCIE- Part 6

In this final post in the series, I will pull together all of the previous posts in the series and discuss the pros and cons of building a home lab versus renting rack time.

Home Lab- Pros

There are a number of advantages to building your own home lab that often makes it attractive to people.  This biggest is usually convenience.  You almost always have a lab available to you any hour of the day for as short or as long as you need it.  I say almost because you can run into issues that would prevent you from using your home lab (equipment failure, VPN connectivity goes down, etc).  But for the most part, it’s always there for you.

You can customize it as you please.  Say you wanted to configure your own topology that’s different from what we use.  You can do that with just a bit of re-cabling.

You can start working through a scenario, leave it for a day, and come back and continue where you left off.  On a rack rental, your ending configs from your first session would have been lost.  So unless you copied it to a local text file, you’d have to reconfigure all of your devices from scratch.  Servers would always have to be configured from scratch since there is no good way for you to back up their state in a rack rental scenario.

Purchasing your own rack is a relatively known expense.  It’s a onetime cost to purchase the equipment for unlimited use.   You will have collateral expenses that I’ll talk about in the next section.  But the vast majority of the expense is up front and one time.  So it’s easier to plan for the expense.

Lastly, the lab is there for you after the CCIE for further studying.  So if you bought equipment that is valid with current code (like a 2500 or 5500 series WLC), you could install the latest code and have a lab to use with your current job.

Home Lab- Cons

Many people only see the pros of owning your own home lab and aren’t aware of the cons involved.  Some are obvious and some you don’t realize until you’ve purchased all of the equipment.  So here are some of the things to know before you spend your money.

Home labs have a large upfront investment, following by varying costs later.  Some of us won’t be able to afford a decent lab all at once.  Unfortunately, buying pieces of your lab over time isn’t all that conducive to studying most of the time.  Once you have purchased your lab, you have the additional cost of powering your lab and the additional burden to cooling your house when it’s air conditioning season.  You also run the risk of equipment failing on you and having to spend money to replace it.  This can be painful when it’s one of your expensive WLCs or your ESXi server.

Some of you might chime in saying that you’d buy from ebay sellers that offer a year warranty.  So that would at least prevent additional expense due to equipment failure.  But now you are without equipment for possibly weeks while you work with your seller to get a replacement for your failed hardware.  That’s possibly time lost studying that you cannot get back.  This is another risk.  Loss of study time due to equipment failure.

Another drawback of the home lab is the time needed to get it up and running as well as supporting it.  First you have to purchase all of the equipment and wait for it to arrive.  Then you need to physically install everything and get all of the appropriate code downloaded and installed.  You need to get your initial configs implemented and determine your topology and IP schema.  This is a little easier if you just plan on following what we are doing on our racks.  But it’s time spent none the less.  Then you need to build all of your servers.  This can take a lot of time if you are having to hunt for downloads.  Also, getting the services on the Windows 2003 server up and running can take some time if you haven’t done it before.  If something isn’t working right, you need to fix it on your own time.  If what you ordered didn’t have enough resources, you need to wait until the upgrades are ordered and arrive.  Getting CME services up and running can be difficult if you don’t have someone in the know assisting you.  It all takes time.  This is generally either not considered, or vastly underestimated if you are building a home lab for the first time.  So count the cost of the time spent on this versus the time that you could be spending in a rack rental.  Time is often one of our most precious resources.

Another logistical concern is where to install the equipment.  You’ll want it somewhere relatively cool and not overly humid.  It’s also going to be making a fair amount of noise from the fans.  Significant others aren’t always thrilled to have it in a more public area of the house/apartment or having to hear it all the time.  If you have small kids, you’ll want it out of their reach.  If you have a lot of APs, those can be a bit of a pain to place.  If you actually have a suspended ceiling to mount them to, that would be great.  Otherwise, you have to spread them out on the floor or different surfaces near the rack.  You may want to buy a half sheet of plywood, stand it somewhat vertically and mount the APs to that.  If you want to mount the APs to anything, add in the cost of mounting brackets.

With a home lab, you are often making some compromises on the equipment.  Hardly anyone will actually buy a 5508 controller and the APs that are actually in the lab.  Most will purchase older generation hardware that can do the majority of what you need.  So there will be some differences that you will need to reconcile in terms of functionality.  Also, you’ll need to tweak any of our initial lab load configuration files to suite your hardware.  It’s not the end of the world.  But it’s a hurdle that can get annoying after a while if you are spending a lot of time in our workbooks, which were written based off of the proctorlabs.com racks.

What do you do with the lab after you get your CCIE?  A large portion of what you buy isn’t all that useful after the lab.  The 2100 and 4400 series WLCs will not run any code past 7.0.x.x.  The non 802.11n APs  are soon to be not supported when newer code comes out.  Even the 1252 is losing support soon.  Your ESX server can be used for newer software.  But if you buy a lower powered server, you won’t be able to run many of the newer servers like Prime Infrastructure, the newer virtual MSE, and ISE.  Those require significantly more resources in terms of CPU, RAM ,and hard drive space.  You can always sell your equipment after you pass your CCIE.  But a good rule of thumb would be to expect to recoup no more than half of what you spent.  This will be due to depreciation and fees associated with selling.  The longer you hold on to the equipment, the less it’s worth.

Lastly, what happens if you are in the middle of your studies and a version update to the lab is announced with all new hardware?   I don’t anticipate an update in the near future.  But you never know how long your CCIE journey will take.  Life has a way of sidetracking you sometimes.  Maybe it’s a new relationship, a new kid, or a new job.  Maybe it’s an illness.  The causes can be numerous, but it’s a definite risk to your investment.  The double whammy of this risk is that the new hardware is going to be expensive because it will be current hardware.   You will have to at least have 2500/5500 series WLCs for newer code and probably even a switch or two that will run the new unified access code for IOS based controllers.  AP updates may be needed as well if the new code doesn’t support what you are using.  You will probably need a beefier ESX box to run the newer servers.  Those costs will add up quickly.

Rack Rentals

So if you aren’t able to do a home lab, or if you want to investigate the alternative, rack rentals are a great way to go.  Since proctorlabs.com is our rack provider, I’ll frame the discussion based on what they offer for wireless rack rentals.

Rack rentals overcome each of the cons that I listed above for home labs.  You don’t have to undergo a large up front expense to get practicing.  You don’t have the added expenses of power/cooling and hardware failures are no longer your responsibility.  The racks are already there for you, so you can be up and studying right away.  The racks have all of the servers running at the correct versions and the Windows services are already configured.  So you don’t need to worry about obtaining the server software or licenses and getting everything running.

While the equipment isn’t 100% lab accurate, you have all of the wireless gear represented (5508 WLCs and 1040/1260/3500 series APs).  All of the servers are there.  But there aren’t any 6500 series switches.  That’s a minor thing though, and including them would have increased the cost to the student dramatically for little return on studying.  So you can do almost everything in the lab blueprint.  Definitely more than most home labs would afford.

Proctorlabs.com can automate lab loads for you.  So you can be off and running with little effort.  No need to tweak config files and paste them into every device yourself.

You can book time slots in 4 hour increments.  That’s about as convenient as you will get with rack rentals in terms of scheduling.  Not that there are many serious competitors out there in the wireless space, but the biggest competitor rents by the day.  So if you want to study for a few hours in the evening, you can do that with proctorlabs.com and not have to pay for way more hours than what you needed.

Lastly, you have future proofing for lab updates.  Rack rental prices may go up a bit after a hardware refresh.  But it would be a pittance compared to the price of upgrading your home lab.

Cost Comparison

So what are the costs for home labs and rack rentals and how do they compare with each other?  It’s important to keep in mind that cost is just one factor.  But it’s often one of the biggest ones.  Most of us are on a budget.  So too high of a cost can totally invalidate an option altogether.  The chart below shows some options for building your home lab.  The basic lab would be a starting point if you couldn’t afford a larger lab to begin with or if you wanted something to supplement using rack rentals as your main hands-on practice method.  The medium lab would allow you to practice the majority of the blueprint from a technology perspective.  But you would have trouble following along with our volume 1 workbook, and it would not work for using our volume 2 workbook.  The full kit is if you wanted to replicate the topology of our racks so you could do all of the workbook labs on your home rack without too much difficulty.

This wouldn’t include the costs of things like racks, Ethernet cables, software, etc.  It also doesn’t take into consideration ongoing costs of electricity, cooling, and hardware replacements.

Now let’s look at what those investments will buy you in terms of rack rental hours at proctorlabs.com.  Each session lasts for 3.75 hours.  But if you link sessions together, you get the full 4 hours on each session except for the last one.  But we’ll just stick with the 3.75 hours for our calculations.  A single session costs $30.  But once you get up to the 25 session SKU, the per session cost drops to $22 ($550 for 25 sessions).  Once you get up to that 25 session level, if you need more you can definitely work with your sales person to buy additional smaller sets of rentals at the same $22 per session price.  Since all of our kits above make it to that 25 session level, we will assume a price of $22 for each rental session.

Below shows a chart of how many sessions you could buy for the price of each kit above and how many hours that translates to.  You’ll notice I rounded down for the number of sessions.

In general, I estimate that most people will need around 250 hours of hands-on time (give or take 50 hours) during their CCIE studies.  Based off of these numbers, rack rentals are definitely a viable option to save money over purchasing your own home lab.  Even if you resell all of your equipment, it can still be a better deal.

Jeff’s Recommendation

In my past, I’ve built home racks for both of my CCIEs.  I built my R&S lab out of my own pocket and spent thousands of dollars.  I built my Wireless lab totally out of extra equipment lying around at work.  Since I started at IPexpert, I’ve been using proctorlabs.com racks pretty much exclusively on a day-to-day basis.  So I’ve had extensive firsthand experience with both sides.  I’ve come to the conclusion that home labs are extremely convenient to have, but a hassle to build, maintain, and adapt to workbooks.  There are a number of benefits to rack rentals that a home lab will never have.  I like making the maintenance of a rack someone else’s job.  I like knowing that I don’t have to worry about upgrades.  My wife likes not having the office space invaded by nerd gear.

If I were to do it all over again, this is what I would do.  Snag as much equipment from my office as I can (without getting into trouble).  If I can build up even a small home lab for free, it would be a good asset to have.  If I’m close to a lab that can do most everything that I want it to, I’ll purchase a some extra pieces if it’s not too much of an investment.  It also doesn’t hurt to ask work to subsidize any purchases.  Then I’ll use rack rentals for studying that my home gear cannot sufficiently allow me to do.

For those of you with no access to gear from work, I’d suggest just going straight rack rentals.  Even the smallest lab will cost about the same as 100 hours of rack time.  That alone could allow you to work your way through the volume 1 workbook, or go through volume 2 twice.