I'm studying for SPCORE

fredrikjj

anyone else here working on it?

Fitzi

I was gearing up to tackle the service provider track but now I think I am going to look at the JNCIS-SP first. One of the main reasons is the cost of the Cisco exams, the CCNA SP exams are $293 AUD each. Whereas if I passed first go I could take JNCIA/JNCIS-SP for about the same price as one ccna sp exam. The juniper course ware is available as free PDFs too, so I figured I would try building some knowledge from the Juniper side before coming back to Cisco SP, which is my plan.

fredrikjj

The topics are QoS, LDP, MPLS-TE and "Transport Technologies"

For QoS, my material will be the relevant chapters of End-to-End QoS Network Design. The book is 1,000 pages, but I will skip the Nexus and Wireless sections. That brings it down to like 600 or 700 pages or so which is a bit more manageable. I'm current reading it and taking notes. I've reached page 250 so far.

I have already read and taken notes on the first half of MPLS Fundamentals so that will be my book for the LDP and MPLS-TE topics. I will cover the remaining half of the book once I'm done with the QoS book.

For the "Transport Technologies", which are things like DWDM, IPoDWDM, ROADM, I will have to find some Cisco documentation. It's only 8% of the exam so it shouldn't be too much of a problem, hopefully.

keenon

same here. Its the last exam for me on this track,

fredrikjj

I've finished taking notes on End-to-End QoS. That doesn't mean that I know everything about QoS, but I've made some progress at least. My next step will be to write some notes for each QoS topic on the blueprint (it's the basics like classification and marking, policing, shaping, etc). I've also started rereading MPLS Fundamentals and reviewing the notes that I already have on that book. Finally, I've added a third book to my reading list called QoS for IP/MPLS Networks since it was recommended to me by 'srg', the Swedish service provider expert.

All in all, this seems like a pretty challenging cert, and probably the hardest one I've taken so far. I'd say that I probably need another two months or so to prepare.

fredrikjj

After studying on and off this summer (mostly on), I've finally booked the exam for this upcoming Monday. A passing score doesn't feel impossible at all, but who knows...

fredrikjj

Failed by a few points so I probably just needed one more correct answer. Ridiculous exam. Obscure RFC level trivia, etc. I don't feel like I could have done anything different in my preparations.

fredrikjj

It's been around a week since I failed and I feel alright for the most part. I've made a list of topics to study and it boils down to having to go wider in some areas, and deeper in others. I've already read a few chapters in MPLS Fundamentals that I skipped before, thinking that they weren't relevant. I've also added MPLS Enabled Applications and all relevant XR configuration guides to my reading list. I'll cover stuff like AToM, VPLS, 6PE/6VPE, etc, and try to get better at XR QoS syntax. I thought I could get away with focusing almost exclusively on IOS QoS because I had INE's RS workbook and because QoS doesn't really work fully in XRv. That turned out to be somewhat of a mistake. I scored only 73% in QoS but 80%+ in MPLS/LDP/TE so it seems like QoS is where I can improve the most.

DPG

Old thread and a dying track but I am halfway there. Passed SPROUTE last November and SPADVROUTE this month. SPADVROUTE took two tries because I spent too much time on multicast and neglected BGP.

I'm working on SPCORE now and of course QoS is still the hardest topic for me. I passed the old QOS exam 5 years ago and it was a pain back then as well.

ricardo_r7

DPG wrote: »

Old thread and a dying track but I am halfway there. Passed SPROUTE last November and SPADVROUTE this month. SPADVROUTE took two tries because I spent too much time on multicast and neglected BGP.

I'm working on SPCORE now and of course QoS is still the hardest topic for me. I passed the old QOS exam 5 years ago and it was a pain back then as well.

Which study materials you used for SPROUTE? I'm using INE videos, then will start reading some books....

ande0255

fredrikjj wrote: »

Failed by a few points so I probably just needed one more correct answer. Ridiculous exam. Obscure RFC level trivia, etc. I don't feel like I could have done anything different in my preparations.

This still holds true today. Some of the exam trivia was in no training materials that I saw at all, and some of it was fairly heavy on the topic. I'm going through the RFC crap myself now to fill these stupid Trivia gaps, like knowing 3-4 routing protocols inside out along with IPv6 IP SLA SNMP NETFLOW ETC is not enough to fulfill the exam requirements.

Just ridiculous the more I thought back to the questions I encountered, so still to this day fred, does that exam suck a freegin cack.

fredrikjj

I never made a second attempt, but SPCORE is possible to pass. It's just harder than ROUTE/SWITCH for the wrong reasons, in my opinion. You need to really know both XR and XR syntax, especially for QoS, and you need to know some additional MPLS stuff that isn't explicitly mentioned on the blueprint. Because QoS doesn't work on XRv, it's hard to study for the QoS portion to the level they expect if you don't have access to real hardware. I almost entirely used IOS-XE (csr1000v) for the QoS topics, and that cost me some points that I needed.

DPG

ricardo_r7 wrote: »

Which study materials you used for SPROUTE? I'm using INE videos, then will start reading some books....

I didn't use INE for SPROUTE. Mostly I just researched each topic and made sure to lab everything on both XE and XR.

DPG

fredrikjj wrote: »

I never made a second attempt, but SPCORE is possible to pass. It's just harder than ROUTE/SWITCH for the wrong reasons, in my opinion. You need to really know both XR and XR syntax, especially for QoS, and you need to know some additional MPLS stuff that isn't explicitly mentioned on the blueprint. Because QoS doesn't work on XRv, it's hard to study for the QoS portion to the level they expect if you don't have access to real hardware. I almost entirely used IOS-XE (csr1000v) for the QoS topics, and that cost me some points that I needed.

QoS does work on the XRv 9000.