INE Data Center v2 RACK/LAB - soon!

chrisone

So I was surfing INE's blog and noticed Brian posted today (7/14) topology diagrams and pictures of him installing the new lab racks for DC v2! I logged into the rack rentals and sure enough he postponed all v1 rack times as he took down the v1 lab and is currently working hard on the v2 racks. When trying to schedule v1 rack times it just says v2 coming soon.

So glad this is coming sooner than later. The diagrams look beastly!

http://blog.ine.com

Iristheangel

Oh no... that's not good at all

If you look at the lab physical topology, that's ONE singular ACI pod split between all racks. They're basically dividing the ACI fabric into different tenants to save money so you're going to be limited to what you can do on this. I guess you can still lab some of it which is better than none but if they charge an arm and a leg for that, they're just ripping people off. They basically bought a $20K lab bundle and are splitting it between 4 pods.

I don't see any mention of upgrading the fabric interconnects. They aren't even in the diagrams. If I recall correctly, they used to have gen 1 FIs and they couldn't be upgraded to the most recent version of code. The blog doesn't mention them upgrading those so... ummm... I guess you're labbing on the old version?

My recommendation for folks doing this track:
- Burn any tokens you have with INE for this rack rental but don't buy TONS at only this vendor. You can lab parts of it for sure but I know Fast Lane and some other vendors have the full racks too. If this ends up being cheaper than them, do sort of a 70/30 split between a vendor that gives you full access
- If you have access to PEC/Salesconnect, do the ACI labs on there
- If you're a partner, see if you can get the ACI simulator somehow
- Download the UCS Emulator as well. UCSM is still a big part of the exam. Insane if INE doesn't put that on there... Seriously scratching my head right now...