A cloud-hosted CCIE Collaboration rack with 28 servers, Webex Calling, and an exam-aligned workbook — ready the moment you log in. $37 for a single session. Bundles drop to $4.98 an hour. Cisco charges $12.50.
Not ready to book? Download the free workbook and see the lab quality for yourself.
When you book a session, you get 5 (or 8) hours of hands-on access via VPN.
Here is what that looks like:
No setup time. You log in. The topology is running. All the nodes are up. You open the workbook and start configuring.
The workbook matches the lab. Every IP, every hostname, every DID in the workbook is exactly what you see in the CUCM admin page, the Expressway GUI, and the Control Hub. No drift. No guessing. No “this domain settings doesn’t make sense”.
Continuous access, not 4-hour slices. Cisco’s official practice labs give you 4 hours, no continuity, and limited daily time slots.
And I do recommend running at least one of those before taking the actual lab, but it’s not a study solution.
The solution I’ve built allows you to book 5 or 8 hours and you can book whenever you want. No fixed schedule, continue where you left off.
Your lab is a home lab, not a rental. This is the reason engineers built home labs — not because they wanted to spend months on infrastructure, but because a rental that resets every session was never enough. With us, your session ends, your configuration stays. Your dial peers, your route patterns, your half-finished MRA setup — all still there. Come back next week and pick up exactly where you left it. Each session builds on the last. Section by section, you work through the workbook until the lab matches the target state — across as many sessions as you need.
There is no longer any reason to buy, build, and maintain your own lab.
When you are ready for a fresh start, you can reset to a known-good baseline on demand.
Webex Calling is part of the lab. You get Control Hub access as part of the lab, this was mandatory for me when I built it.
You are not doing it alone. You get a private Discord channel, run by me. You can ask questions directly. Other candidates are in there too. When you get stuck at 2 AM, you post it — and someone who has been there answers.
Up to 60% cheaper per hour than Cisco.
| UCPros Lab | Cisco Practice Labs | |
|---|---|---|
| Single session | $37 / 5 hours | $50 / 4 hours |
| Extended session | $49 / 8 hours | — |
| 40-hour bundle | $199 ($4.98/hr) | — |
| Per hour | from $4.98 | $12.50 |
| Continuity | Config preserved between sessions | Resets to zero every session |
| Scheduling | Flexible — no fixed time slots | Limited daily slots |
CCIE Collaboration is the most resource heavy of the bunch. To run a CCIE Collaboration lab. You need a multi-cluster CUCM environment, Unity Connection in HA, Expressway-C and E clusters, multiple CUBEs, a simulated PSTN, Active Directory, Windows PCs at every site, Webex Calling with its own locations and DIDs, and enough RAM to power a small data center.
Minimum 10 GB per CUCM node. Multiply that by ten. Add the CUBEs on the resource hungry c8kv, the Expressways, the edge routers. You are looking at 28 servers before you configure a single dial peer.
And that is just the Cisco gear. Then there is the plumbing — DNS, NTP, Active Directory, certificate authority, subnetting, DHCP scoping.
By the time you have sourced the hardware, fought through the provisioning, and made all the plumbing line up, you have burned over a month before practicing a single scenario.
Most candidates spend more time building their lab than actually studying.
And until now, they had no choice.
A four-hour rental resets when your session ends. You cannot complete a CCIE Collaboration workbook in a single sitting — the scope is too large. So the only way to actually study — to work through tasks across sessions, building on what you configured last week — was to own the infrastructure yourself, or use incomplete, mostly outdated rack solutions.
We polled active CCIE Collaboration candidates. Here is what they told us:
Three different problems. One common thread: you are spending more energy fighting the preparation than doing the preparation. And nobody is telling you whether what you are doing is actually working.
You ran the scenario. You configured the route patterns, registered the phones, set up the SIP trunks. The phone rings.
But is that the right configuration? Is that how the proctor expects it? You don’t know — because the workbook you downloaded was written for a different topology, a different IP scheme, and sometimes a different version of CUCM entirely. The subnets do not match. The dial plan assumes a two-site model and yours has three. So you are not configuring against a spec — you are improvising. And improvising feels like studying, but it is not. It is building muscle memory for your own guesses.
So you finish your study session with the same doubt you started with: “Am I actually getting better, or am I just getting familiar with my own mistakes?”
And the worst part — you cannot ask anyone. You are stuck, you need help, but you are not going to say it out loud.
And underneath all of it, the question you cannot answer: am I actually ready to sit the exam? There is no signal. No score. No one to tell you. So you study more, build more, delay more — and the exam date keeps moving further away.
That doubt is more expensive than any rack rental. It is the thing that turns a three-thousand-dollar investment into a paused candidacy and an expired cert track.
I will be honest — for a long time, the CCIE Collaboration lab felt too big for me too. A vague wall of everything, and no clear picture of what was behind it. What changed it was a workbook.
I sat down, started going through the tasks, and realized: I have done most of this before. The wall turned into a list. That is the moment the cert stopped being abstract and started looking like a plan.
My name is Pasha. I have been doing Cisco UC for 20 years, and running UCPros.net since 2017, where almost 3,000 UC engineers follow the work.
I built a full hosted CCIE Collaboration lab. Not a toy topology. The real updated thing:
All this comes with a workbook that matches the architecture.
Every scenario runs on the actual topology.
You can see the workbook quality for yourself — it is free to download, right now.
UCPros CCIE Collaboration Lab Workbook v3.1 covers the full scope of the CCIE Collaboration lab exam blueprint. It is written as a target-state specification — it tells you what must be true, not which buttons to click. The lab is done when every requirement holds.
Plus: full credential sheet, network diagram, PSTN dialing instructions for every country code in the lab.
The workbook is free.
Read through the target state. See the topology, the dial plan, the Webex integration, the MRA setup. Use it to benchmark where you are in your own preparation. The workbook is free.
$37 for 5 hours, $49 for 8, or grab the 40-hour bundle at $4.98 an hour. You get VPN credentials, you log in, and the lab matches the workbook exactly. No infrastructure to build. No VMs to manage.
Section by section, scenario by scenario. With direct IP access, faster troubleshooting and a community to support you.
The CCIE Collaboration has always been the hardest certification in the UC track. But the reason most engineers never attempt it is not the technology — you have been doing this work for years.
It is everything around it. The lab you would have to build. The months of infrastructure. The cost. The isolation. The feeling that the CCIE is for “other people” — the ones with home labs, unlimited time, and an employer footing the bill.
That barrier is what we built this lab to remove. The workbook is free. A session starts at $37. Bundles drop to $4.98 an hour. The topology is running when you log in.
Here is why that matters right now.
With nearly 15% layoffs across tech in the last two years, companies are keeping the engineers they cannot replace.
But this is not new — in twenty years, across recessions, budget cuts, and an increasingly bleak LinkedIn feed, I have not seen one fired CCIE. The cert is not just a credential — it is job insurance. And the companies that keep you also need you for the partner discounts.
38% of the candidates I queried who started have paused or given up. But how many never started at all — not because they could not do the work, but because the barrier made it look impossible?
The barrier is gone now.
You open the workbook. Section 1: Users and Devices. The hostnames resolve. The dial plan matches throughout. You set up the LDAP sync. You login to the Webex app, it fails, it takes time, you troubleshoot, you learn, you don’t wonder if it doesn’t work because you laid the pipes wrong, and you are just burning precious time, because the infrastructure is set up, it’s exam-aligned and the workbook’s target state matches it all.
Next week, you come back. Your configuration is exactly where you left it. You open Section 2: SME Cluster. You build the ILS mesh, configure GDPR, test the inter-site call. Section by section, session by session, the workbook fills up with checkmarks — and none of your work disappears between sessions.
Just clean, exam-aligned, scenario-by-scenario practice. The way CCIE prep was supposed to work all along.
Not ready to buy? Download the free workbook — it is yours to keep, no strings attached.
Built by Pasha at UCPros.net. 20 years of Cisco UC., 14 years CCIE. Questions? pasha@ucpros.net