Starting the Juniper road

Since we have some Juniper stuff in our datacenter as part of the core and edge setup (mostly running routing-instances, eBGP for our public IP space and eBGP for the MPLS routes that the SP handles for us) and primarily because two interesting projects have come up (migration of the staticc core towards an OSPF based core and our own AS number + public peering) I felt it would be good to get some solid ground with the Juniper material.

I'm involved with 90% of all things datacenter so I have a bit of working experience with the product under my belt. Stuff like rollback has helped me in production a few times. I recently started studying for the JNCIA-JunOS and in doing so, I've found a few things to be very helpful already (show | compare, or something like show configuration | display set) and that is the main goal I've started this track.

So, I decided to drop the VCAP-DCD (VMware certification) for now and gain some ground on Juniper. Here's me hoping that since we run Juniper in production environments, the stuff that I learn will be more usable than the Cisco track I was one. When I don't have the use case to learn a particular technique or vendor, the knowledge will fade away eventually and that is the reason I'm having trouble picking up the CCNP track, most of our datacenter stuff is Juniper based.

I'll be doing JNCIA first but I hope to reach at least JNCIP-ENT since the stuff we do should be in line with content discussed in those exams. Perhaps even JNCIE someday..

For now, it's back to basics for me but I'll use this thread as a log for my progress.

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Comments

tomtom1

So within a week I went through most of the Juniper JNCIA material. Still need to do some QOS though but in the process I did see some nice opportunities to improve our current production configuration which is always nice. Now I just need to work out the configuration bits and deploy this in a change window.

Anyhow, I should tackle the QOS part in the next couple of days and I'm hoping to sit the exam in about a week or so. After that, it seems JNCIS-ENT seems to be the next step.

MickQ

Best of luck with it. I just recertified in my Junos and it's a nice change to the Cisco style of doing things. How do you find it?

tomtom1

I absolutely love it! JNCIA exam date set for the 12th, but in the meantime, I went ahead with the JNCIS-ENT material. My CCNP ROUTE sure comes in handy here. It shows that independent of the vendor, the protocol operations are the same. JunOS has implemented some nice tricks along the way in their OS, I especially like the way they debug things (traceoptions). The ability to specify exactly what you need and in a separate file is very neat, in a lab environment as well as in production.

Currently my lab exists of 2x SRX210H and 1x EX2200-24t-4g but I'm thinking about throwing an EX4200 in the mix after completing the JNCIS for JNCIP and eventually JNCIE. Since we use this stuff in production, I can get the real world connection I missed in the CCNP material. As far as content goes, I think the JNCIA compares to CCENT / CCNA and the JNCIS relates to CCNA / CCNP concepts.

tomtom1

Knocked the JNCIA-JUNOS out of the ballpark this morning. Thinking about switching back to the Cisco track and finish up my CCNP since a new job with a Cisco shop came on my radar.

Staunchy

Nicely done dude, what was your score?

Only thing that takes getting use to is view the active configuration. Sometimes I get lost reading the config due to the indentation.

I see you also went ahead with the JNCIS material, what are you using? I wanted to continue with my CCNP after finishing my JNCIA last week but was told by my boss he wants me to 1st get JNCIS-ENT

tomtom1

Staunchy wrote: »

Nicely done dude, what was your score?

Only thing that takes getting use to is view the active configuration. Sometimes I get lost reading the config due to the indentation.

I see you also went ahead with the JNCIS material, what are you using? I wanted to continue with my CCNP after finishing my JNCIA last week but was told by my boss he wants me to 1st get JNCIS-ENT

91% on the JNCIA. I need to stop JNCIS for now, but I mainly worked my way through the manuals.