Is having a home lab like having a home gym?

One of the things a CCIE candidate will need to come to terms with sooner or later is practising for the lab exam. Unless you are in the situation where your daily work tasks enable you to touch every single section on the blue print (not me) you are probably going to need time to play around with the areas you feel the least confident with.

If you go through the bill of materials that vendors such as IPX (pdf) or INE (pdf) use in their topologies and more importantly what hardware and software types Cisco specifies you will see in the lab exam, you are going to need a fair bit of kit at home and even if you are a good ebayer, it's not going to be very cheap.

To be fair, training vendors are well aware of this, and one thing they have rental facilities where you can use their equipment and it's already wired up to their topology, and most have the capability to load the equipment up with exercises from the workbooks enabling you to get right into it.  I expect that this equipment would be what they use for their bootcamps as well.  This would be a rough equivalent of going to a gym - you are handing over your money for an allotted amount of time, you book your time in advance by not using the session you are costing yourself money.

The other extreme would be to get the equipment that matches the vendor of your choices topology and it's available whenever you feel like using it - this is the home gym.  The typical problem people associate with a home gym is that it sounds good particularly when you start out, you may not be able to get the top line product because you aren't rich, or perhaps you are able to swing it and for the first while it's good.  The problem is that you need a lot of self discipline to go and do it, since you don't have to start at a particular time - you may not get around to starting but going for the CCIE anyway is going to require a good amount of self discipline either way.

I think this analogy is falling pretty flat because at an actual gym, you might have a personal trainer or at the very least you can see the other people at the gym working out, so perhaps going to a bootcamp may be closer to going to the gym but really that is probably a very small portion of your overall studies (and you may not even go to a bootcamp)

Home lab or rack rental - I think both have their place and the best choice will be on an individual basis.  In my case I made the call for a home lab, I like the idea of being able to use my gear whenever I want, should it be for 30 minutes or a full day and the configs are exactly as I left it.  I like the idea of a rack rental, I think it may even be more cost effective in the end, I just don't like the idea of having to book resources on a lab, and if I need to cut things short because of work or family, then its like throwing money away.  Rick Mur makes a compelling argument for using rack rentals. That said, when I finally get on the homeward stretch and believe I am near ready for the lab, I think I will be booking time on some mocklabs.  When it's all said and done, if you have a home lab, you have the ability to sell off your equipment when you have finished (or decided that you have had enough) depending on the time frame from when you buy your equipment until you sell it, you may be able to recoup a reasonable portion of your spendings.

For my home lab  I will be virtualising the routers and using physical switches, if I find this set up not very successful, I may sell of the switches and end up going for rack rentals.  It's early days on this blog and perhaps there aren't many readers at the moment but I would be certainly interested in other CCIE candidates thoughts on the matter.