i am planning to buy laptop for gns3 labs for cisco service provider topics , at min 4 routers to be simulated at a time like ASR9K . And also for virtualization applications like vm ware any suggestions . My budget is around 1400$ .
The best place to see if your requirements are sufficient for GNS3 is at the GNS3 site. Here they specify minimum, recommended and optimal requirements. Take a look at the following link:
Times are changing my friend, and I think the certification updates from Cisco are starting to reflect that , it’s a Brave New World for us networkers! Anyway look at Google Cloud Platform, you can do a lot with it and EVE-NG for under $400 (price of VIRL images) and a subscription to Network Lessons