Just a short post regarding the above, should have posted this long ago.
I often get the question or see someone asking this on the forums. “How much switching is required in the SP lab?” or “Can I prepare using only dynamips?”. The short answer is you can rely 100% on dynamips for SP preparation. If you are not comfortable with just using dynamips, you can use the breakout switch method. Although this is overkill for SP it is a nice setup for RS. I ditched the real switches in favor for the dynamips switch modules due to the noise factor.
Another thing to note is that L2 switching is pretty much completely preconfigured. See page 11 of the attached Preparing-SP-lab-part1 22Dec08 d-3927.pdf on the cisco learning network page https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/docs/DOC-3927 to get further details.
