Tried EVE-NG (Community) on a dedicated Ubuntu server.

EVE-NG > Physical lab. 💻⚡

EVE-NG (Emulated Virtual Environment – Next Generation).

EVE-NG runs as a bare-metal hypervisor (or on top of VMware/Proxmox) and lets you drag-and-drop real network device images.

Physical labs are expensive, loud, and heavy. GNS3 is great but can be finicky with certain topologies.