My $400 eBay CCNA lab is overkill
Contents
The CCNA exam is November 2, and the study plan is already in motion. A plan full of VLAN and OSPF labs eventually needs something to lab on.
So I went shopping on eBay. Total damage: around $400 for six pieces of used enterprise gear, and all of it is set up and running.
Is this overkill for one certification? Absolutely.
The gear
Here’s what the $400 bought:
- Catalyst 2960G, 8-port Gigabit: a compact Layer 2 switch. Access switch duty, and a second player for trunking and spanning tree labs.
- Catalyst 3560-X with PoE: the workhorse. It routes at Layer 3, so SVIs and inter-VLAN routing happen right on the switch, and the PoE ports mean the phone and the AP don’t need power bricks.
- Two Cisco 1941 ISRs: routing protocols need a neighbor. With two real routers I can watch OSPF adjacencies form, then break them and figure out why.
- Cisco C9117AXI-B: a Catalyst 9100 series WiFi 6 access point, for the wireless chunk of the blueprint.
- Cisco CP-8851: a desk phone, which turns voice VLANs from a paragraph in the book into a port I can actually configure.
- Palo Alto PA-220: the odd one out. Not Cisco, and not on the exam, but work is transitioning to Palo Alto, and I’d rather learn it on real hardware before it lands on my desk.
Nothing here is current-generation. That’s the point: the CCNA doesn’t care how old the switch is, and neither does show spanning-tree.
Why real hardware?
Couldn’t Packet Tracer cover most of this for free? Yes, and I still use it daily.
But typing enable on a console session to a switch that’s actually forwarding my traffic is a different experience. Bad cables and misbehaving console adapters are part of the job too, and a simulator hides all of that.
(Yes, I know CML exists. The used market was cheaper.)
Conclusion
This is more lab than one certification needs, and I’m happy with it. For around $400 total, I get to run every topology in the study plan on the same kind of gear I’d touch at work, and the PA-220 keeps earning its spot after exam day.
Next up is working through the labs themselves. The first CLI session is already written up, and the VLAN work from the lab plan is next on the bench.