Following on from the previous post about building your own rack, which we found to be expensive, the second option is to rent a rack from one of the many vendors online. The third option is to build a hybrid of emulated routers and real switches, which you can read about here.

Assuming this was the route we were going to take, it’s then a question of who to pick, so lets have a look at some of the vendors out there. I did a search for “CCIE rack rental” and will compare the top four. All four offer blocks of four hours.

Rent a Rack

INE – www.ine.com

INE unsurprisingly were the top of the list. Obviously they will follow their own labs, and have configured and tuned the racks accordingly.

To complete all four of their workbooks (available for $599) they recommend the following (purchased as rack tokens):

400 rack hours for the first two workbooks (1,800 tokens)
150 rack hours for workbooks 3 and 4 (650 tokens)

A total of 550 hours, or 2450 tokens.

Prices are:

Final notes

If it were me, and renting was the option I was going to use (and not saying there is a right or wrong answer here), then I think I would purchase the INE labs, and use the ccierackrentals racks. This would cost about $1400 and include everything.