Well happy friday.
We're planning to build a MPLS lab this summer.
If anyone has suggestion for cheap hardware to simulate a
implementation of all the RFC's from the Core to the CPE.
it would be greatly appreciated.
From our research,
It is pretty much all over the place, like the vendor did it on
purpose to milk all the money they could from the spec :).
As usual, off-list would be best.
PS: I'll forward a summary of the information to the people
interested by this subject.
Well happy friday.
We're planning to build a MPLS lab this summer.
What's this? Operational related content on a Friday? *angrily hurls popcorn across the room*. LOL.
MPLS lab sounds cool. For students? Already experienced engineers? Simulating a production environment? Tell us more details please! 
If anyone has suggestion for cheap hardware to simulate a
implementation of all the RFC's from the Core to the CPE.
Hmmmm. Good question. Any particular vendors you want to emulate? C/J I presume (maybe interop between them)? They do have official VM versions freely available of representative sampling of their product lines now days. Start there? Run it on a digtial ocean cloud? (They are currently $MY_FAV_CLOUD_PROVIDER) Or if you've got some spare server class kit kicking around your nearest colo then just load up Ubuntu 12.04 and Virtualbox (or heck, even w2k12/w8 which is what I'm using for my network vm lab). I've got...
HP (comware something something (v7? I dunno) . Oh and they have some cloud router deal to, I think I grabbed that.
Arista (got this at SCALE this year). Not sure if you can grab it "officially offically"
Cisco (asa, asr and that cloud router thing)
Juniper (mx emulator something someting)
Huewai (eNSP)
GNS3
I'm not at home right now, I'll put the links to the above item downloads on my lab wiki and update the thread (I'm embarrassed I didn't do that already).
Of course there is also OpenDaylight and other Linuxish stuff. But that's beyond MPLS. Linux/BSD MPLS seems to be not so great last I looked.
it would be greatly appreciated.
Same here.
From our research,
It is pretty much all over the place, like the vendor did it on
purpose to milk all the money they could from the spec :).
Haha.
As usual, off-list would be best.
If it's cool with 10k of my closest friends, I'd say this would be a welcome on list topic?
Cisco CSR1000v.
Mark.
if you want support for standards and RFC , emulating Major players sounds
good. Just like IOS-XRV if you are looking for latest SP emulation, this
depends on how much traffic / testing you are looking at. Do you want to
integrate it with one of your own routers for routes similar to looking
glass or connect it with Traffic Gens ? most of them possible with Standard
server PC's with vmware ESX or similar open source VirtualBox products.
vyatta may be another option as such.
With CSR1000v (and IOS XRv), if all you want is to test
features, I think you get up to 2.5Mbps worth of throughput
free (I know this about CSR1000v, not sure about IOS XRv).
If you want more, you then start to pay.
Mark.
You get a 60 day trial with unlimited bandwidth and full features. After
the 60 days are up, your throughput goes down to 2.5 mbps.
I recommend running the latest version, IOS-XE 3.12.
*Pablo Lucena*