In reply to Karen Drew.

The days of building a home lab in my personal opinon are over. I spent a lot of money building a home lab a few years back buying stuff from friends, eBay etc... only for this is become old/stale and not meet my future requirements without spending even more money for upgrades. Now, Cisco DevNet gives you access to all the stuff you need to learn network automation for FREE! Check out the VIRL DevNet sandbox http://cs.co/sbx-multi - here you can model your own network with routers, switches, firewalls and even SD-WAN and NSO, we have over 70 other sandbox's you can use for free too! If you are new to this follow this URL https://developer.cisco.com/startnow/ and start your automation journey. Here we have learning labs for network automation, videos and blogs.

Good luck on your journey!