From: Arne Kuhlmann (ccie-lab@xxxxxxx)
Date: Sat Aug 12 2000 - 09:12:42 GMT-3
What do you guys think of renting time on a virtual lab? For those who done it,
has it been worthwhile?
I have never used a virtual lab and am somewhat reluctant to do so:
- You have to book a certain timeslot, so you have to use it at that time. With
a home lab, you can practice whenever you want. If you only used it for 3 hrs
that day, you don't have to pay for 8.
- I like to have physical access to the routers so I can wire them however I
want for different scenarios. At a home lab you are not stuck with the
predefined setup like on the virtual lab.
- The home lab does cost more, but when you are done you can sell it, if you ar
e
lucky for about the same price you bought it for. The money spent on a virtual
lab is gone...
- There are some things that are very expensive to set up at home, like ATM and
voice. Luckily we have some ATM stuff at the place where I work, so that's not
a
problem. Can you really practice voice on a virtual lab? It's one thing to
configure the voice ports on a router, but then I'd like to pick up the phone
and make a call with it...
To get back to the original topic: I am paying for the whole CCIE journey
myself. Spent hundreds of $$$ on books, thousands on Routers (about 5k). And
I'll be taking a CCIE lab class with MTS in London late October (another $10k
with flight/hotel). After that I'm off to San Jose on Nov 18.
Not only are travel cost a major factor (I'm from Germany) but also the lost
income as a contractor for the weeks spent on training and the lab.
Regards,
Arne Kuhlmann
Brad Ellis wrote:
>
> I paid $25,000 for my lab...it took a while to pay off my credit cards!!!
> (hence I started selling hardware). I would have never passed if I didnt
> buy my own lab. Now that I look back, I wasted WAAAAY too much time putting
> the lab together (hunting down hardware). I would have been much better off
> purchasing virtual rack time from CCBOOTCAMP.COM or another virtual rack
> place that had ATM and VoIP. I probably could have done that and had my
> company pay for it as training...oh well. Good luck in your journey. If
> you need any cisco hardware, just let me know how I can help.
>
> ttyl,
> -Brad
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