My Home lab

I know its been awhile since my last update but I haven't had a great deal of time up my sleeve for Cisco studies lately - a couple of other network related things have been keeping my occupied for the last month.

Firstly, I needed to renew my JNCIS-M, which was actually fun because I was able to play with some Olives and re-affirm my understanding on Juniper policy and configuration as it had been awhile since I had played with Junos (yes I passed that exam)

Also for the last few weeks I have been heavily work on IP/MPLS architecture and systems for SROS which has been a lot of fun and quite educational in building a reasonably sized demonstration network to support a number of current and legacy services.

I guess the take home message here is that while protocol operation is pretty much the same throughout, the way things are implemented and named can be different though and certainly each has a different paradigm in how things are achieved that depending on your particular context can be a bonus or a hindrance.

Anyhow, while I am planning to extend my studies further into the Service Routing Certification Program as certain units have immediate benefits in my workplace - my overall focus is still targeted on reaching CCIE status.

I think that many candidates working towards their R&S and Voice CCIEs are breathing a sigh of relief in that the open ended questions in those tracks are being retired in a couple of days.  It's just that little bit of extra stress that can be avoided while focusing on the main game of troubleshooting and configuration.

Anyhow - the topic of this post is my home lab environment. As I mentioned previously I decided that I would be going the virtualised router and physical switch path.

With the virtualised routers there were still some connectivity related issues to the physical switches that needed to be resolved.  Initially I figured the lowish cost of purchasing a number of Linksys USB200M ethernet NICs may do the job, and to be honest when I had about 4 of these things, they appeared to be fairly reliable even if it was quite messy and were natively supported with Ubuntu.  Once I went up to 12-14 of these things, they would seem to randomly decide to go out of service.

An alternate option is to use quad port ethernet NICs - however the motherboard in my server didn't support that many NICs, though I understand it is quite a good method to use.

In the end, I ended up purchasing a third 3550 to act as a breakout switch thanks to it's dot1q tunnelling and l2protocol tunneling support.  I wont go into detail on how to set up the breakout switch as there are good explanations on how to achieve this already.

My home lab is set up in my garage so that the fan noise does not drive the household crazy.  I have a Baytech RPC3 which enables me to remotely power on the kit to save on power costs - enabling me to work from my home office without having to walk in and turn things on.  Coupled with the VPN capability I previously set up, I can be pretty much anywhere on the internet and still work on my lab.

It's probably easiest for me to show the pictures and then describe if a bit more.

My home lab equipment lives in a Dell Rack which I picked up from Ebay last year, as you can see its only about half populated - plenty of room for more toys in the future.

Removing the doors and side panels, Looking at the front and going from top to bottom:

• 3550-24PWR acting as a Breakout Switch between the PC and the rest of the switches
• Cable Management
• 3750-24TS
• 3750-24TS
• 3550-24
• 3550-24
• Cable Management
• Dynamips PC in a Coolermaster Elite 360 case (Powered by an AMD 630 quad core processor with 4 Gig of RAM and running Ubuntu 10.04 a second NIC is installed to provide connectivity to the Breakout Switch)

Hidden under the tray that the PC is residing on is a management switch - it connects my home network to the RPC-3, The Dynamips PC and the 2610 Terminal Server (It's just a little Dlink 10/100 device I had lying around)

Looking from behind we can see:

• The Baytech RPC-3A which provides remote power control to everything else in the rack (except for the Dlink switch)
• The 2610 with NM-4A/S acting as a Terminal Server for the 3x3550s and 2x3750s
• The other gear is the front mounted 3750s, 3550s and Dynamips PC

To give an idea on the depth of the rack, here is a side view shot:

Right now I haven't selected a training vendor for the lab, so I have been really only playing around with things for my own learnings rather than following a structured plan - the cabling is basically:
Green for breakout switch to switch (representing router to switch connectivity)
Red for Switch-Switch connectivity
Yellow - out of band management