Guide in Progress: Building out a home lab

[Ether]

Sheesh, that must of be painful.

[Seittit]

Drifting OT I realise but the best one I ever seen was I think 15.0.2SE4 (whatever lol) on a 3750X, its fairly new IIRC, anyway it was, I quote, 'may run high CPU if ten-gigabit modules are inserted'. And by high CPU it means the switch is basically dropping frames left and right and will even screw up any attempt to tftp/ftp a new image for rollback. Of course this is for a customer who slavishly follows ITIL prescriptions and doesn't understand 'if it ain't broke'. Boy that was a fun evening, talking the onsite hands and feet through rommon.

That's the exact issue i've run into, HULC process annihilating the CPU on 3750s. It's a well-known bug with the switch running 15.x, where the process that controls the LED lights goes down the rabbit hole, never to return without a reboot. Best practice is to admin-shut all ports not in use, and reload when the CPU creeps over 70%. What a pain in the behind.

[icecream-guy]

15.x code is required to mitigate the Cisco OpenSSL vulnerability, not really required for a home lab

[sgtcasey]

why anyone would want to run 15.x code on a switch is beyond me. the only added feature, to my understanding, is a call home feature. if i had a nickel for every time i ran into bugs on a switch running 15.x code, i'd have almost a dollar.

We're running 15.x on our 3750X's and 2960S's.  So far we haven't had any network-breaking issues but there has been a bug or two show up.  Nothing worth scheduling downtime to upgrade, though.  I have noticed the more 3750X's you put in a stack the slower the entire thing seems to get.  We limit our stack sizes to 5 switches because of that.

[Splat]

To dredge up an old thread...

I'm tossing around the idea of upgrading my home server to an ESXi box running CSR's.  My current server that I used for my CCNP is a pretty moderate linux box dedicated to dynamips.  I can run 15 or so 3750's pretty comfortably, or 5 7200's.  There's 12 break out ports connecting to my switches.

To start, my questions regarding the ESX/CSR solution are:

• How does the ESX solution connect to external switches?  Can I map router interfaces to NIC's or will I need to trunk them to a dedicated breakout switch?
  
  
• I'll either have to buy an ESX license or reload after the evaluation period.  Is there an experation on the CSR images as well? 
  
  
• With dynamips, I can load topologies/configurations from the dynamips command line without running a seperate tftp server, and I can do packet captures on any interface including serial.  Can I get that in ESX?
  

Thanks for your opinions!

[wintermute000]

1.) Your VMs map their vNICs to vswitches. You then break it out to pNICs (physical i.e. real). Theoretically you could dedicate one pNIC to one vNIC but how many physical NICs does your ESXi have? Hence everyone uses VLANS... which entails a breakout switch.
2.) Not if you don't activate the advanced features and/or throughput licensing. If you do I think IIRC its 90 days. Anyway they're only routers, easy to paste show runs back in
3.) Not sure

Re: running 7200s.... er.... Have you looked @ IOU in dynamips/GNS3? I can get ridiculous amounts of stuff running in IOU at what feels like 10x the speed of emulated IOS routers. INCLUDING MULTILAYER SWITCHES

http://www.networking-forums.com/index.php?topic=47.0

[Splat]

Re: running 7200s.... er.... Have you looked @ IOU in dynamips/GNS3? I can get ridiculous amounts of stuff running in IOU at what feels like 10x the speed of emulated IOS routers. INCLUDING MULTILAYER SWITCHES

http://www.networking-forums.com/index.php?topic=47.0

Thank you for this, I thought IOU was only available to cisco employees.  Are you running it in GCE or on your own hardware?

[wintermute000]

Re: running 7200s.... er.... Have you looked @ IOU in dynamips/GNS3? I can get ridiculous amounts of stuff running in IOU at what feels like 10x the speed of emulated IOS routers. INCLUDING MULTILAYER SWITCHES

http://www.networking-forums.com/index.php?topic=47.0

Thank you for this, I thought IOU was only available to cisco employees.  Are you running it in GCE or on your own hardware?

It is possible in GCE, its possible on your own ESXi and/or vmware workstation, and I'm sure its possible on anything that will let you spin up a VM.

[DanC]

I've got a DL380G6 with 72gb of RAM, luckily my old employer decommissioned 10 of these servers that were being used as ESXi hosts. Couple this up with 4 x 3560G and bobs your uncle!

I probably do 95% within ESXi, it's great! CSR1000V, ISE, ASAv, vWLC, AD Services etc. I have an Ubuntu VM running Ser2Net that maps my USB serial cables into the switch console ports.

Only downside is that it's pretty power hungry.

[wintermute000]

Just wanted to give a shout out to UNETLAB. All those on GNS3/IOU should look into it - its multi vendor and client-less.

http://www.unetlab.com/documentation/supported-images/index.html

I have it happily running IOS, Arista vEOS and Juniper vSRX in the same VM/lab It really is the dream networker's lab playground

[lap]

I've been building out my home lab for a year and a half and documenting my progress here:
http://technerdlap.blogspot.com/

My original build and initial pains are here:
http://technerdlap.blogspot.com/2014/11/home-lab.html

Have since upgraded cards, ios, as well as spent countless hours troubleshooting what wound up being mostly layer 1 issues (ugh).
I'm happy to share my home lab experiences on this forum, as I've spent WAY too much time trying to get it all working, partly because I could not find a comprehensive guide online.

Just got a handful of 2811's from work that were going in the trash, so they are great upgrades from my original 2620xms.
Now have the capability to run IPsec tunneling across my home lab network, which makes me more excited than I'd care to admit.

I'll throw some pending updates on here, as well as my blog soon.
If anyone has any specific questions about a home networking lab, just ask. I'm up to 13 routers and an access server on a skeletek rack that could support 3 guerrillas:) Also have remote power management, so I only run the gear when I need to lab. Have everything going through a power meter and have calculated I'm spending about 38 cents an hour running my current rig (6 2811s, a 2620 and a term server).

Alright, gotta get back to failing miserably at configuring BGP on this beast...

Lap

[deanwebb]

Pssst... would you like your blog linked up here?

[icecream-guy]

How are you supplying power to that rig? two separate circuits?  I can only get about 7 or 8 devices on a single 15 AMP circuit before the breaker trips. Got a few other things plugged in as well. Gotta keep an eye on that so you don't fry your circuits,  solution is not really a DIY fix, installing breakers in the master panel always gave me the willies. prefer to have a professional do it.

[lap]

My current configuration (6 2811's, a 2620 and a cyclades term server) pulls about 5 amps (250 Watts), as measured by a Kill A Watt power meter. That 5 amp draw also includes an EZ Outlet (for remote power management), Netgear 8 port switch and an old Dell (Plex).
5 amp draw on a 20 amp circuit, with a spike during post/boot.

Think I'm paying 15 cents /killowatt hour. Math was never my strong suit, but I think this rig costs 38 cents an hour to run (250 Watts/hr X .15 Kw/hr).