Dreaming of CCIE-DC

slinuxuzer

So I have five classes left at WGU, I've been thinking about CCIE for ten years, but finally have some real finances where I could make a run at it. I want to hear some opinions from the folks here on my prospects. I am a system architect for a large manufacturing company. I have deployed tons of VMware on HP servers, Cisco Nexus 5/2k's, one large deployment I did 1000v, lots of Netapp storage experience with NFS, a decent amount of brocade FC, no UCS unfortunatley, no 7k. I want to stay in the virtualization / data center game, thats why I am thinking DC.

I am single, 30, and could invest the time and money. I have in my work lab, two nexus 5548UP no L3 card, 2 nexus 2k's, C7000 blade chassis with flex-fabric and 10Gb eth pass throughs. I could get two MDS9216i fibre switches, I may at some point be able to add a UCS chassis, 7k's in work lab not likely to ever happen.

I have CCNA cert that is about two years old at this point, I don't work in networking full time, but I put a lot of time into CCNA.

I am interested in hearing the opinion of everyone here on how best to proceed, my goal is to gain CCIE, I expect this will open enough doors for me to work on more challenging projects and possibly gain better employment.

I have a concern about rack time availability and because of this I am wondering if I should go down CCIE security track simply due to more rack time being available.

Thanks in advance.

Roy4USA

"I want to stay in the virtualization / data center game, thats why I am thinking DC." That should be the reason to go after the DC instead of Security Track. Plus the experience and current lab that you listed will benefit you in the DC Studies.

RouteMyPacket

Why not start reading what material is out there for DC? Thinking and doing are two different things so start on the reading and see what you think.

slinuxuzer

Thats my plan, reading the Ciscon san fundamentals book right now, I figure I'll read a few thousand pages and see where I stand.

WiseWun

What you first need to do is stop dreaming and start doing! Avoid the security track simply because of your concerns with rack availability. By the time you get to that stage, training vendors will add more capacity.

joelsfood

Stick with datacenter, but yes, expect issues with rack time. I know a lot of companies are running out of warranty on initial UCS deployments (our first batch of gear is 4 years old now) so cheaper ucs gear is coming up on ebay.

If you happen to work for a Cisco Partner, SIGN UP FOR PEC. Partner Education C (The C slips my mind), gives you access to real hardware labs for nexus, mds and ucs. I've never found a day where at least one pod for something (the VPC/fabricpath lab if nothing else) is not available for me to hop on and do a quick refresher. THe labs are running 7 months out too, so the rack rental issue is less of a concern than it might be.

Get the reading list from the blueprint, but also pick up a copy of Routing TCP/IP V1. It was highly recommended from a friend who works with multiple CCIE-DCs as a way to get your mindset into thinking like a networking guy. Data center track or not, the writers of these tests are network guys, and think and write like network guys.

I'll tell you in just under 7 months how the lab is.

gorebrush

DC stuff is on PEC? Oh my. I have PEC

joelsfood

Under Labs- Architecture. It's not technically CCIE prep, but if you compare it to the blueprint, you'll see it's a pretty good match. Once I get approval to order the INE workbooks, I'm going to match up the WBs to the PEC topologies and see where they cross so I can save my tokens.