Hi im building a small lab to improve my networking skills currently have 951G-2HnD and was going to invest a couple more hEX S and a few small managed switches, I plan to populate the various subnets/lan's with Raspberry PI's I have kicking about.

Cost is a issue im aware of GNS3 but prefer to have some hands on experieance that home lan packets can pass through. Is my plan flawed and can anyone recommend a decent book or two to add to this. Am I right in thinking the smaller Mikrotik routers and switches pretty much do what the bigger ones do but obviously slower and have less ports.

Thanks for any help...........

Am I right in thinking the smaller Mikrotik routers and switches pretty much do what the bigger ones do but obviously slower and have less ports.

Well, not exactly. There are some differences. Comes down to what you want to do. I'm hoping MikroTik makes a small version of their CRS326 so I can have rule table features and the like. However, you can get pretty far with their software otherwise.