Thinking about updating Cisco Certifications

So Cisco has changed quite a bit over the years, and so has the certification process.
I decided I would like to upgrade my Cisco skills and certifications.
Thankfully I work for a company that has been in the process of upgrading a lot of our equipment to the latest Cisco Meraki gear.
With that upgrade process, a lot of older Cisco, Dell, HP, and other gear is being pulled out.
Having great people to work for, I asked to build a Cisco test and certification lab from the old equipment.
So starts the journey of pulling together all of the equipment, taking inventory, and find out what can be used for a current lab build.
I have done quite a bit of reading on different certification sites, including ones that sell labe equipment.  It seems that about 90% of the commands for the certifications tests can be done in 12.4, and if necessary, some older IOS levels.
Having version 15 would be great, but that usually involves fairly new equipment that could be costly.  Even some of the auction site specials can get expensive because that is what people are searching for.

In this process, I am going to document here in this blog, the equipment that I gathered, determined whether it could be used for certification testing, and the latest IOS I could get it to support without spending no, if very little money on.

The first of the hardware is as follows:

1st Switch: WS-C3750-24TS-E
Updated IOS to: c3750-ipservicesk9-mz.122-55.SE10 [Released 13-Feb-2015]
This is a nice switch as it has Layer 3 and Stacking capabilities.
Specifications from the datasheet:
●  24 Ethernet 10/100 ports
●  2 SFP-based Gigabit Ethernet ports
●  32-Gbps, high-speed stacking bus
●  Innovative stacking technology
●  1 RU stackable, multilayer switch
●  Enterprise-class intelligent services delivered to the network edge
●  IP Services software feature set (IPS)
●  Provides full IPv6 dynamic routing
It has 128MB RAM / 16MB Flash

1st Router: 2621XM
Updated IOS to: c2600-advsecurityk9-mz.124-15.t14.bin [Released 20-Aug-2010]
This is a nice Dual 10/100MB Ethernet and quite a few expansion options.
This particular unit has the following boards installed.
2 FastEthernet interfaces
1 Serial interface
1 ISDN Basic Rate interface
1 Virtual Private Network (VPN) Module
It has 128MB RAM / 32MB Flash

More to come.

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