While we're talking about building a home lab, let's talk about the cheapest home lab ever...That'd be FREE. A group of guys from France have put together a Cisco emulator known as GNS3. Notice I said, "emulator" rather than "simulator". This is the real deal guys...put together a network diagram and boot a REAL IOS in a PC-based lab environment.

Best of all, it's an open-source project which means it's free! The download link for GNS3 is http://www.gns3.net/download . In addition, a great guy named Josh has a ton of video tutorials walking through the setup of GNS3 at BlindHog.net . Here's a direct link to "Building an Internet Lab with GNS3 ".

The only thing that GNS3 is missing is labs. It's great to build a topology of routers...but then what? Ah...but a solution is emerging. Stay tuned for more on this... :o)

NOTE: All credit for Cisco emulation is not due to the GNS3 group. It all started with Dynamips, whose project page is here .