Home Lab - Topology

Spend bit of time today to come up with a topology to get some hands on.
This should help me to complete the L3 and l2 infrastructure section.

Topology is primarily based on  the home lab setup explained in the excellent site at http://mrncciew.com/2012/10/20/my-home-lab-i-am-getting-there/..
Kudos to Rasika for his great work. His hard work paid off as he got the magic number last week!!
Setup for the time being is as given below:

Figure 1  : Home Lab topology

Voice side of things is not setup yet but plan is to use a 2811 as CME and get a 7921g off ebay.
Things like  MSE, VSS  and OEAP it will be rack rentals.

Was thinking of running BGP,RR and some funky stuff on the WAN but as BGP is not part of this game, i resorted to EIGRP. Also added a NSSA area to keep things interesting.

I have created situation within the topology that will cause a RPF failure so it will be good fun.:-)


Update 18/09/2013 :Due to lack of resources I have downgraded my lab topology which only contains 2 sites.

ACS 5.2 implemented

It took few attempts but I managed to get it  working. Had few challenges with  ESXi and the ACS install itself.
Hosting Platform : I used a generic PC with a quad-core processor and 4GB RAM.HDD 65GB.


VMware ESXi 4.1:
Issue : Installation did not proceed as the Gugbyte onboard LAN card was not recognised.

workaround: Install Intel Pro 1000 LAN card and installation was successful

ACS:
Issue 1: Did not get "setup" option upon installation
Workaround:Need to select Linux other with 32bit as the OS

Issue2: ACS was trying to install on the DVD which had 0 GB free. So it was throwing an error and installation did not complete.
Workaround: change SCSI adapter to LSI and then installation was successful

 Issue 3: If the setup does not match the ACS  hardware requirements, OS will get installed but the ACS application will not be get installed. I had RAM for 3GB as oppose to 4GBso the ACS application was not installed. this can be verified by "show application status acs"Increased memory   to 3.8GB and everything worked.Will upgrade memory in the near future as I need to enable WCS on the same host.

I'm not a proficient with VM so some of the above would be pretty basic.Nevertheless I thought it may help someone  to install ACS in an efficient manner as as I spent bit of time troubleshooting/researching above issues.

wireless written and home lab

Long silince was due to the fact that I was studying for the written exam.I had to re-take the exam mine expired early this year. Like all good plans, I could not attempt the lab before it expired. I could have spent that $400  towards the lab.. :-(

Good news is I managed to get through. I was lucky as I recently completed a Cisco wireless design and things were fresh in my head. If not, I would have to spent  much more time and effort. Must admit that  there were few surprises in the written exam of areas I thought would be obsolete.Don't know anyone who uses them in the enterprise..may be they are there specifically for the  ccie candidates!!!  It was a good eye opener for me and I will be focusing on these particular areas during lab prep.

Also have started adding few things to the home lab.So now the setup is  4402x2 and few APs  (3500x 1, 1242x 2 and 1130x 2) .Can't afford to have the whole setup so I will rent racks when I'm ready take on full labs. During the next few days  I'm trying to get ACS (eval) and WCS(eval) installed.Not a Microsoft person so getting the CA up and running would be another challenge!! Well that is battle for another day.