Passed Brocade BCNE/ Thoughts on Exam

codedwar

So I passed the exam this morning. I was honestly very unimpressed with it. I think it was the easiest exam I have taken thus far. On top of how basic it was, the minimum passing score is only 58%. I'm thinking the exam is mostly a marketing tool for Brocade. Give a bunch of free vouchers, make test pretty easy, and you have a bunch of network engineers with purchase authority/input that know the basics of your product.

I would only advise to take it if you get a free voucher or work in a Brocade environment. If you have a CCNA and know the material pretty well, you wont have any problems with the BCNE. Their IOS is very similar to Cisco and most commands are the same or very close. If you just want to pass the exam, you could get by only reviewing their product line. Even though I wasn't impressed with the exam, I'm still glad I took it. If someone put one of their switches/routers in front of me and said "make it work", I could do it but only because I studied more than I needed for the exam. Learning something well enough to work on it in the real world is really the important thing anyway.

On to CCNP Route exam. Hopefully in the next month. Just need to do a few more BGP, PBR, and route map labs and I think I'll be solid to test.

ande0255

What resource did you use to study for this exam? My MSP is starting to deploy brocades for smaller customers with tighter budgets, but I haven't bothered studying at all as like you said it's very similar to Cisco IOS.

codedwar

I initially signed up for a free CCNA to BCNE CBT class on the Brocade website. The CBT had good info and outlined a lot of the differences but was super boring. The guy who narrated had a voice like a computer and just read the slides. Signing up for that CBT got me a free voucher though. I got an email like a week after signing up with a free code. I also did a few google searches for practice questions and watched a few youtube vids on brocade configuration. There are some significant differences you want to be aware of. For example, the way you assign vlans is pretty odd. Instead of assigning vlan to the interface, you assign the port to a vlan under the vlan configuration mode. It makes it pretty tedious for trunks because you have to assign the trunk port to any vlan you want to traverse the trunk.

it_consultant

That is only true of their corporate line of switches. It isn't that tedious to simply tag your VLANs on the trunk port, in fact, I would say it is less tedious than VLAN pruning a port in "trunk" mode. This is substantially similar to the way that HP does it.

You also have to watch your terminology when you go from Cisco to non-Cisco stuff, I have seen that bite many people in the butt. In fact, just what you said there "pretty tedious for trunks" because in non-Cisco land, a trunk are ports in a LAG.

codedwar

it_consultant wrote: »

That is only true of their corporate line of switches. It isn't that tedious to simply tag your VLANs on the trunk port, in fact, I would say it is less tedious than VLAN pruning a port in "trunk" mode. This is substantially similar to the way that HP does it.

You also have to watch your terminology when you go from Cisco to non-Cisco stuff, I have seen that bite many people in the butt. In fact, just what you said there "pretty tedious for trunks" because in non-Cisco land, a trunk are ports in a LAG.

Haha I can't believe I referred to it as a trunk within 5 hours of taking the exam. You are right though. Its pretty easy to get messed up on the terminology if you work primarily with Cisco.