Expert's answer

You will plug the IP phones into the switches that you have for your lab. If you bought non-POE switches, you will need to purchase the additional power supplies for each phone in order. As you will find out, POE switches are more expensive because of the power supplies necessary to power the phones but it means one less thing you have to plug into the phone at the desk it will be.

As to the CME routers, you will need to plug the router into the Ethernet switch that your IP phones are plugged into, assuming you have just one switch at this point. Hopefully, you have both FXO and FXS ports/cards available in your CME router. The FXO ports will connect the CME to the pots line(s) that you have available for testing. Having one or more FXS ports in the CME router will let you test integrating non-IP phones with the IP phone(s) that you have. It will also let you see the challenges you will face handling fax machines - which don't necessarily play by the same rules as the IP phones.

Not knowing what books you already have, I would suggest heading to Google and searching for

CCVP study lab

One of the resources I found was www.ccvp.org. I would also suggest that you consider purchasing the Cisco books for the different CCVP exams. Part of the information I found while researching your question pointed me directly to information from the Cisco CCVP books.