I would not expend money on those labs. The current CCIE lab uses 3560 switches, that haver other qos capabilities than 3550. Also, if you have the ios could emulate routers with gns3/dynamips, and connect each router ethernet to the switches interfaces using qinq, from the gns3 host to a switch called break out box.
Better, try to get some 3560, and a good pc with a dot1q capable nic. You will get a much better lab environment. CCIE Lab is based on 12.4T ios versions, if you cant run this on 2500 or 2600 plaftorm, so these will be useles for a real ccie training.
Br
Alex.