1st INE DC Lab Time

ninjaturtle

I did my very first INE Data Center rack rental today for a full 8.5 hours. As a first timer, that was pretty sweet! What they've done with rack rentals for the DC track blows my mind. To be able to jump on that type of gear, and the setup they have is pretty wicked.

I got through a few labs, but I got stuck on the first OTV lab. I couldn't get it working, and I'm not sure why. Of course, when I really got into the deep troubleshooting my time expired.

I definitely need to get some more rack time. This isn't going to be pretty, as I'm going to be racking up a lot of rack time which means lots of $$$ spending. But I just think of this like any schooling or college, you have to pay the piper to invest in yourself.

I'm still at the CCNA DC level, as I'm taking the 1st exam this Friday and hoping the schedule the 2nd shortly after, so I can jump on the real bandwagon and study for CCNP-DC. But just to get some exposure to the Nexus gear was just super fun, and motivating to learn even more. I'm definitely in love with Nexus!!!

It's 5:40am here and I need some sleep. I'm out.

Cheers,

Alex90

So are you following the CCIE DC workbooks for the time on the racks? Also do you have any experience of the IPexpert racks? I've got to get the voice exams out the way before the change to collaboration at the end of the year but after that then I'm on the DC.

ninjaturtle

Alex90 wrote: »

So are you following the CCIE DC workbooks for the time on the racks? Also do you have any experience of the IPexpert racks? I've got to get the voice exams out the way before the change to collaboration at the end of the year but after that then I'm on the DC.

Yup, I just need some exposure to the Nexus switches. So I just went through all the Nexus labs, or at least the ones I could finish during my rack time. I sneaked in another 2.5hrs early this morning with everything in the rack, including UCS and MDS switches, along with the 2Ks. That was pretty awesome, but I'll DEFINITELY need more than 2.5hrs to dabble in those labs.

I don't have any experience with IPexpert racks. I was actually thinking about renting some rack time in between the INE time, as that's more and more difficult to score rack time. Per a conversation online last week with IPexpert, they aren't any better as they were booked 60 days out on the DC rack I believe they use Proctor Labs if I'm not mistaken.

Alex90

Sounds like you've got a good plan! Are you using the OCG DC books, if so are there any labs in there you can follow? I really like IPexpert especially the DC videos and Collaboration, both instructors are really enthusiastic and engaging, but not quite as over the top a Jeremy Ciora for example who tends to get side tracked and ends up talking about something completely different.

IPexpert have two different DC rack available for rent, a technology rack and a mock lab. On the technology rack you can get 3:45 hour slots pretty much every day so you wouldn't have any issue getting rack time there. On the other hand if you wanted to use the mock lab rack then you'd have to wait about 60 days as you mentioned. Tbh I think the technology rack would probably be okay?? I use there collaboration work books/videos and racks for my voice/collab studies and can't really fault them!

SteveO86

Gotta love the rack rentals.

The funny thing about about OTV, if mulitcast OTV gives you trouble switch it over to unicast /adjacency server mode and see if that gets it going.

Ironically once you pick apart OTV the toughest thing is how dependent it on multicast.

ninjaturtle

Alex90 wrote: »

Sounds like you've got a good plan! Are you using the OCG DC books, if so are there any labs in there you can follow? I really like IPexpert especially the DC videos and Collaboration, both instructors are really enthusiastic and engaging, but not quite as over the top a Jeremy Ciora for example who tends to get side tracked and ends up talking about something completely different.

IPexpert have two different DC rack available for rent, a technology rack and a mock lab. On the technology rack you can get 3:45 hour slots pretty much every day so you wouldn't have any issue getting rack time there. On the other hand if you wanted to use the mock lab rack then you'd have to wait about 60 days as you mentioned. Tbh I think the technology rack would probably be okay?? I use there collaboration work books/videos and racks for my voice/collab studies and can't really fault them!

Good to know about the Technology racks!! I'll have to check that out now, especially with day to day access. Do they make you buy the workbook too?

I don't believe there are OCG books for CCNP DC, there are actually no official CCNP books for the data center track. Which is bs imo. How can you release such an exam and not have books for it? Sure you have other books that cover the topics, respectively. But you still need an OCG book, especially for the NP tracks. The certification industry has become a full on business now, hence why some of these exams are broken into 2 exams, such as the CCNA-DC. I just took the 640-911 exam on Friday and passed. That should NOT be a single exam, not to mention from what I've gathered on the forums the 2nd exam is a little more difficult. The second exam should have the book, not the first one as most of that was CCENT material.

I'll have to poke around the forums and see what you guys used for CCNP-DC. As of right now I have the following books to assist with my knowledge with the data center track:
NX-OS Nexus Switching 2nd edition
Data Center Fundamentals
Data Center Virtualization Fundamentals <--- this is a killer good book! Read a little and other colleagues have highly recommended it.
Online Cisco documentation <--- need to dig for these ones