I agree, it definitely makes sense to get hands-on experience. Rather than building a physical lab, you may want to consider to build a virtual lab based on VMware Workstation (see e.g. Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab). I'm running such a virtual lab too, and from my personal experience I'd recommend a CPU which allows 16GB (or more) memory and a SSD for the VMs. I never had issues with CPU or disk performance, only the memory (I've go 16GB) is a limiting factor when I'm running multiple VMs simultaneously.
André
