Labbing for CCNP Enterprise on a laptop
Hey everyone,
I'm prepping for the CCNP Enterprise on a Lenovo P15 Gen 1. On paper it should be more than enough:
- Intel i7-10850H (6C/12T)
- 64GB RAM (4x16GB)
- EVE-NG on VMware Workstation Pro with 48GB and all 12 threads assigned
In practice? It's struggling.
My target topology is a full campus: 2x Cat9k, 2x Nexus 9k, 2x FTD, and a couple of C8k edge routers. The problem is the Cat9k images alone default to 18GB RAM each, just spinning those two up pushes memory to 90% and I start getting OOM errors before anything else is even online.
I'm weighing two options:
- RAM upgrade : (~$400) , swap the 16GB sticks for 32GB and go to 128GB total
- CML subscription : pay for Cisco Modeling Labs, get up to 20 nodes, and hope their optimized images are lighter on my current hardware
I keep seeing people online running massive multi-site topologies and I genuinely wonder what they're running underneath. Are they all on dual-socket EPYC workstations with 256GB+ sitting in a home lab rack?
Has anyone actually pulled off a full CCNP campus lab on a laptop, or is that just not realistic? And if you've used CML , do the images actually run leaner than what you'd pull from CCO?