My CCIE Voice Lab Setup
As you can see I am fortunate enough to have everything needed for the CCIE Voice lab. Ebay is a wonderful thing and also I’ve been able to take advantage of partner NFR pricing as well. It is still a significant investment but like any geek out there, being able to tinker and play with whatever scenario you want is an awesome way to learn. There is another APC 1500 going in shortly so I can evenly distribute the power load. When the entire rack is running it draws about 1100watts which isn’t too terrible considering everything running. Also where I live in Canada the power rates aren’t too ridiculous. I’ve got everything remotely accessible via VPN through the ASA5505 firewall. This allows me to remotely control power to every device through the NPS at the top of the rack. I have found this feature to come in very handy depending on what type of lab I am working on. For example, if I am working on CUE, I can just have the specific router, switch and terminal server running. As you can also likely guess, everything that has to do with Callmanager, Unity, IPCC Express, and many other Cisco software products are all running in VMWare ESX 3.0 on the server in the bottom of the rack. This box is a dual Opteron 2.0ghz with 16GB of ram, 3 Broadcom Gigabit NICs, and 1TB of SATAII and SATA disks.
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