Instead of making a physical lab, setup a virtual lab. I made one for my vmware studies.
Get a good i7 with 32 gb of ram (the max right now), a couple disk drives, and the rest is software. One loaded ESXi host can run you a virtual datacenter.
In one drive (use your best - a small SSD will work great):
openfiler for iscsi
vCenter Server appliance for vcenter
at least 2 vESXi hosts
on the bigger drive, your virtual machines inside the vESXi hosts (this is what you give openfiler as disk resource)
switching is virtual, sharing the physical ESXi host's network - host to host is really fast :)
google can find you tutorials on each of the above; for openfiler i used the virtual appliance and uploaded it with the vsphere converter
http://www.openfiler.com/community/download
the vcva appliance is a ovf template (vmware.com)
there are some tweaks you need to do to enable vitual ESXi hosts:
http://www.vcritical.com/2011/07/vmware-vsphere-can-virtualize-itself/
and your imagination is the limit - I expect to even be able to test SRM with this setup, if I can get 2 networks simulated (shouldn't be hard).
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