I recently bought several Cisco products off of eBay to build my own hardware lab at home. I am doing self study to take the CCNA and I'd like the lab to serve well enough to carry through to CCNP and perhaps beyond.
This is what I have: I have a Cisco ISR 2811 with 64 bytes of DRAM and a compact flash card rated at 256 bytes, I don't recall what the NVRAM memory limit is. I start it us and do a show version and this router says it has IOS 15.1M
I also have a Cisco ISR 2851 with 64 bytes of DRAM, a compact flash of 256K bytes and the NVRAM is 240K bytes. The IOS on this device is IOS 12.4(25c). I would like to have IOS 15.1 on it as well. I understand this more recent IOS is better to work with because the new CCNA ver. 2 test has stuff that deals more in line with IOS ver. 15.1. I have tried to research how much memory is required on a Cisco ISR 2851 but it seems difficult to find a definitive answer.
Is it worth my while to put IOS 15.1 or above on a 2851 for the CCNA and CCNP exams?
Is the 2811 capable of handling the IOS 15.1 that it says is installed as configured?
What are the memory requirements to support IOS 15.1 or above on a 2800 series router, or do you have a link that I can check out.
I also have three Cisco Catalyst switches: Two 3550's and a 3560 and all three according to the sticker have IOS 12.4. Should I upgrade the IOS on them or will they suffice for preparing me for the CCNA and CCNP?
Cheers,
David
