I know this question probably gets asked a lot around this subreddit, but I want to know if it is really worth it. I can see it being useful to practice for CCNA, which I plan on studying for after my final semester in college (and CCNP in the future), but many people from r/ccna say that it’s better to stick with Packet Tracer. However, I’ve seen some post in this subreddit saying that it helps with gaining experience when you tinker with a home lab and can potentially help you land a job, so I want to hear your guy’s opinion on if it’s worth investing for a home lab or not.
If you want to play around and see if it could help you, you could start with a couple cloud based systems first. Amazon Web services and Google both have permanent free tiers and linode and digitalocean both have pretty good free trials.