The New CCNP: Voice Certification is Expensive...For Me

Now that I'm preparing to deep dive into the CCNP: Voice track, I'm in the very early stages of figuring out what hardware, software, etc I'll need to get through the entire exam. At the very minimum I'll need to cough up at least $2,000-3,000 dollars I think. Sadly when I put together my CCNA: Voice lab before the new update I used all equipment that isn't compatible with the new version 8.x that Cisco is currently on. I have a few 1760 routers and possibly even some VWIC's and some other stuff that I might not be able to reuse. I should of done better research of the long term and what will be needed.

Oh well lesson learned, I'm going to either borrow equipment from work or purchase a few 2801's and a beefy PC to through all the Cisco Software on in a VM environment. I need a new PC any ways, it's about 4-5 years old lol. I can obtain IP phones for both Type-A and Type-B easily, my work laptop for Presence testing and other random things. I'll need to buy some cheap analog phones which is simple and other random things. I'm going to go off of this good diagram which is a HQ, one branch, and a PSTN router for external calls. If absolutely needed I'll buy equipment to make a 2nd branch office. Hopefully this will get me through everything. I'm estimating about 18 months of study time give or take. Cisco changes certification requirements so much that if I'm going to tackle this I need to start now rather than later. It would suck to get 3/4 through the CCNP: Voice and have to start over due to an update to the track.