Are two routers enough for practicing CCNA skills in your home lab? Maybe, maybe not. But you can practice a surprising number of CCNA-level router tasks with a two-router lab using the topology ...

The behavior I'm seeing is that all traffic isolated to PCs connected to the router runs at gigabit speed (verified with iperf), and traffic isolated to PCs connected to the switch runs at gigabit ...

I'm looking to have Router-On-A-Stick configuration where the Router VM is running inside ESXi while the switch is physical. All VLAN configurations will be on the physical switch.