IOS 15 mandatory for new CCNA

[tdsipadmin]

I have a fair amount of older Cisco Gear. Trying to figure out if IOS 15 is crucial to being successful on the new CCNAx exam or I'll get some more life out of this old gear?

I have several 2600 series routers, several 2500 series (one of which is my Frame Relay Switch, another is Access\Console server), an old Pix 515E Firewall, a Cisco 2950 switch, and two 3550 switches. Planning to leverage GNS3 as much as possible for routing, but any thoughts from the group on whether any of this old stuff is useful?

Routers are all IOS 12.x. I think the switches (at least the 3550's) are EMI images. Not sure about the 2950. This stuff has been sitting around collecting dust for some time.

I also have some HP ProCurve gear and some old servers I run Quagga (http://www.nongnu.org/quagga/) on.

Thanks in advance.

Chris

[wgillick69]

What I've learned is that *some* of the switches require 32MB DRAM in order to handle the IP Services level of IOS (equivalent to EMI). I don't quite know all the rules, but since I only started building my HomeLab a few months ago, I was careful to only get routers and switches that I believed were IOS 15.x compatible.

Even so, I've made mistakes in getting too-old equipment. So, it might be valuable for us in this SVUG forum to post the successes we've had in upgrading specific equipment to 15.x. Even so, I've read that there are some cutoff points within 15.x where certain features are not supported on older gear.

I wish I had the master compatibility chart that Cisco Tech Support uses.

Regards,

__Will in San Jose

[Leo Laohoo]

I don't think it would make much difference between studying your CCNA with 12.0, 12.1, 12.2 or 15.0 IOS loaded into your switch. 

The main objectives is you know the basics:  STP, 802.1q, VLANs, ACL, etc.