Cisco Home Lab electricity bills/costs

[rashhad91]

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone can answer me how much it will cost to run a basic ccna home lab i.e. 2 routers and 2 switches? I know it depends on the uptime of each device but I also want to understand everybody's experiences with this. Which router, switch models are less power consuming?

Is it worth me setting up my own lab or should I go out and get virtual software such as boson, packet tracer? 

[Rob Cluett]

I'd like to suggest Cisco VIRL.  It's not perfect... yet. It does a really good job of allowing you to set up functional networks.  GNS3 is another option.

[rashhad91]

I have experimented with both and I know VIRL is very costly. GNS3 on the other hand doesn't support switching. Do you think it is worth investing in a home lab? 

[Rob Cluett]

For me I wanted to avoid having hardware that I needed to physically configure and then reconfigure.  For example I have 3 networks ready to spin up at all times.  One running EIGRP, OSPF and BGP,  one running pure OSPF, and another that's a campus switched network. You can't really have that flexibility with a bunch of hardware.  The cost to implement VIRL for me was under $1000 that includes the license and hardware (servers).

The one negative is that Cisco VIRL is hardware agnostic.  Meaning that you won't get the chance to play with supervisors or different line cards and the like.  I hope someday they'll replicate certain platforms but for now it's just a version of IOS or NX-OS that your turn up and connect links to.