Dear Cisco, free licenses for home labs?

Question

If anyone from Cisco reads this: Why not offer free licenses for EOL hardware, with some verification that it is for home-use only? Besides being great for learning, we also reduce E-waste by using products that corporations can no longer use. But quite often these hardware devices are locked down with no possibility (or budget) to acquire the license costs.

theideaofcoffee · Accepted Answer

If you aren&rsquo;t going for a Cisco-specific certification I would forget about getting exclusively Cisco gear and look for any open/&lsquo;gray box&rsquo; hardware that run newer open network OSes like SONiC [0], or Pica8 [1]. The skills are transferable and second-hand hardware from a variety of manufacturers like Edge-Core, QCT, or Dell or others is often available for super cheap on eBay.The advantage here is having a wide variety of experience outside of Cisco lock-in with open software (normally Linux based, some are based on *BSDs) and the actual software license is free and open for the most part. You also will get a full linux distro with a familiar cli so you can run automation and config management code directly on the switch, which would help you learn multiple things at once. Also it doesn&rsquo;t hurt that you&rsquo;d get 10 gigabit, or even 100g(!), Ethernet for your homelab for super cheap :).For your shopping, look at the SONiC hardware compatibility list [2], often you can find lots of these for cheap. Pick up some cheap and solid optics, fiber and whatnot from FS. [3][0] https://github.com/sonic-net/SONiC[1] https://www.pica8.com[2] https://sonic-net.github.io/SONiC/Supported-Devices-and-Plat...[3] https://www.fs.com

xmodem · Answer

Just pirate it, they're not going to care.

ay · Answer

What specific hardware do you have in mind ?
Meantime - if your target is specifically learning/certifications - have you tried the virtual labs?
https://learningnetworkstore.cisco.com/cisco-learning-labs
https://learningnetworkstore.cisco.com/cisco-modeling-labs-p...
They are not “free”, but the pricing does not seem to be too bad if your goal is the certification.
You can also search for “GNS3” and see what pops up :-)
I would argue virtual devices are the most friendly approach e-waste wise.

CobaltFire · Answer

Ruckus/Brocade effectively does this now with their licenses all being honor system.

booboofixer · Answer

What does the verification process look like?