This might be an option for those who dont want to buy a new machine, or dont have the experience to deploy linux.
I have tested using Amazons EC2 elastic computing to run the IPExpert and other SP dynamips labs. I used a a linux box instance with the below spec "High-CPU Extra Large Instance 7 GB of memory, 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each),1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform" The pricing is per hour and works out cheaper than an online rack in many cases. You just need to remember to terminate the machine after your lab !. Especially useful for people in Europe you can choose to host in a European data center, most SP racks are in the US and latency can be an issue. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing the above setup runs ~50% CPU for IPexpert so you maybe able to use the next smaller box. If anyone is interested I can put up a script that you copy to your instance run and it installs dynagen/dynamips and so on in under 30 seconds. You just need supply the IOS images. Thanks Kevin PS. I dont work for Amazon in anyway so the above is not a plug , just thought it might be useful for people to know.
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