I've been trying to build a lab for Cisco SD-Access for the last few years but the price of the hardware required has been absolutely brutal. A few years ago I made a note about it to myself and the total price of just the switches was around $1000!

It looks like things have no changed as I was able to pick up the above hardware very cheaply. Now that supply chain issues have mostly been resolved there's likely now an overflow of older kit in the used market.

4x Cisco 3850 POE switches 3x Cisco 1832i access points

Total price around £300 / $380, the cheapest I could find hardware that is still in the supported list for SDA.

I did start out looking for 2x 3850 and 2x 3650 but the 3850s are the same price used for some reason so figured why not.

I will virtualise the rest of the hardware like DNA centre (technically now Catalyst Centre..) and routers, wlan controller, on my 2x Dell R730 lab servers (dual e5-2680v3 and 256gb ram) running ESXi 7.Possibly I might need to upgrade the cpus on them but you can go all the way to dual 2699v4 22c/44t on these which is nice, I think that is actually the same spec as the earlier DNA centre appliances.