No hardware? don't worry. You've got GNS3!

GNS3 is a great piece of open source software, or should I say great pieces of open-source software that allow you to do emulation of network equipment from Cisco, Juniper, Microtik and other providers and also use real virtual machines as part of your test network. Read more about it here and download it. This will be a tutorial on setting up a lab environment consisting of several Cisco 7200 series routers, 1 Juniper router aka an Olive, several machines running FreeBSD(You can run whatever OS you'd like when you virtualize it with Qemu or VirtualBox). When downloading GNS3, please choose the all-in-one installer which comes with all the packages you'll need.

What you will need:
1. A Machine with decent enough memory and a good processor(Using a Dell laptop with 3Gig of RAM and a Dual-Core CPU myself). I'm sure you guys can get better. :-)
2. GNS3 of course,
3. Cisco IOS software (don't ask me where to get that!)
4. JUNOS software (no asking!)
And finally, some time to spare!

Begin by setting up your GNS3 software. See instructions here.
After successful setup of GNS3 and configuring your IOS images, you can go ahead and stop here, after-all you can build a complete lab with that, but one without 'real' network hosts. Point to note, if you run your Cisco routers in the lab without first calculating their idle-pc values, the lab might be too slow or even not run at all. So please, you need to set the idle-pc value first.
You calculate the idle-pc value as follows:

1. Start the router. Also start your task manager and select the performance tab. (This will show you how setting the idle-pc value actually helps). You will notice that your CPU usage is very high.
2. Right click on the running router icon 3. Click on the Idle PC option 4. Select one of the options marked with an asterisk and apply. 5. Check your task manager for the CPU utilization. If it hasn't reduced or has reduced only slightly, please re-calculate the Idle PC value and select another value. Repeat this until you are satisfied with the utilization you see.

Lab Screenshot

To be Continued soon..........