Nutsy's CCIE DC Lab Diary
All,
Over the past two+ years I have been slowly working my way through the Cisco's Data Center Cert Track. There have been a couple times that I got side tracked via completing other certs, coaching youth sports, or just working eating up time.
In a previous post I stated that I completed the CCIE DC v2 Written Exam. So, now on to the lab. The way things are looking, I think I will take the first attempt, the first week of January. Already, I have a 10 Day DC boot camp in October in California with Micronics. (Iristheangel care to make a celebrity appearance to the class in Glendale?)
The amount of books, videos, and various config guides I have read, watched, and scanned, I have lost track of exactly. Back when I first started the DC journey, I was using Videos from IPExpert. But, they went the way of the Dodo. Recently, I have moved on to using the free videos from Lumos on YouTube, a lot of Cisco Live, and just finished Jason Lunde's videos on Udemy. (As a side note I do recommend Jason's videos. He states the objective the videos right up front say the series about how do you get the system up and running, and doing something useful. I feel he hit the nail of the head.)
My day job has had me do lots of 1K/2K/3K/5k/7K. Nothing really interesting with FabricPath, LISP, EVPN, or OTV (yet). I have done a little UCS. A big hole in my knowledge base is ACI. That became glaringly apparent during the written exam. So, I have been starting my studies in reverse order of the blueprint, and hitting ACI hard. Specifically, trying to read through all the latest 2.X config guides, and design guides. Also, I have read Cisco BGP EVPN VXLAN book, Cisco's ACI book, and the Cisco ACI cookbook.
Next step for me is to hit the ACI labs hard. Currently trying to work on getting access to an ACI setup either via rack rental, or ACI simulator.
Hopefully, this "Diary" will be my daily accountability about for what I did for every single day. Currently it is 64 days until the boot camp, 10 days at the boot camp, and I think about 71 days after the boot camp till my target lab date.
So to start off, today I finished the last nine videos in Jason Lunde's ACI video series, and finished reading the ACI L3 Networking Config Guide.
Until tomorrow, happy studying.
Over the past two+ years I have been slowly working my way through the Cisco's Data Center Cert Track. There have been a couple times that I got side tracked via completing other certs, coaching youth sports, or just working eating up time.
In a previous post I stated that I completed the CCIE DC v2 Written Exam. So, now on to the lab. The way things are looking, I think I will take the first attempt, the first week of January. Already, I have a 10 Day DC boot camp in October in California with Micronics. (Iristheangel care to make a celebrity appearance to the class in Glendale?)
The amount of books, videos, and various config guides I have read, watched, and scanned, I have lost track of exactly. Back when I first started the DC journey, I was using Videos from IPExpert. But, they went the way of the Dodo. Recently, I have moved on to using the free videos from Lumos on YouTube, a lot of Cisco Live, and just finished Jason Lunde's videos on Udemy. (As a side note I do recommend Jason's videos. He states the objective the videos right up front say the series about how do you get the system up and running, and doing something useful. I feel he hit the nail of the head.)
My day job has had me do lots of 1K/2K/3K/5k/7K. Nothing really interesting with FabricPath, LISP, EVPN, or OTV (yet). I have done a little UCS. A big hole in my knowledge base is ACI. That became glaringly apparent during the written exam. So, I have been starting my studies in reverse order of the blueprint, and hitting ACI hard. Specifically, trying to read through all the latest 2.X config guides, and design guides. Also, I have read Cisco BGP EVPN VXLAN book, Cisco's ACI book, and the Cisco ACI cookbook.
Next step for me is to hit the ACI labs hard. Currently trying to work on getting access to an ACI setup either via rack rental, or ACI simulator.
Hopefully, this "Diary" will be my daily accountability about for what I did for every single day. Currently it is 64 days until the boot camp, 10 days at the boot camp, and I think about 71 days after the boot camp till my target lab date.
So to start off, today I finished the last nine videos in Jason Lunde's ACI video series, and finished reading the ACI L3 Networking Config Guide.
Until tomorrow, happy studying.
Comments
62 Days till CCIE DC boot camp, and 143 (approximate) till first lab attempt.
61 Days till CCIE boot camp, and 142 (approximate) till first lap attempt.
As a side note, went to a Cisco User Group in my area, and got to meet Beau Williamson. Really enjoyed talking with him. (Every once and awhile I need to get out of the house.)
https://vimeo.com/blairhicks
59 Days till CCIE boot camp, and 140 (approximate) till first lap attempt.
No, it has been a weird and winding road for me. Originally, I started down the CCNA/CCNP R&S path. Not long after I finished the NP, moved to another company. There, I was titled as a "Senior Network Engineer." However, what I was really doing was "Senior Network Security Engineer." Basically, my job aligned with Cisco's security track almost exactly. (Yes, even CBAC, and few other off the wall technologies.) I took the CCNA Security then, and passed. Shortly after my company went belly up.
I moved across the country to get a job where I could get more experience on BGP, and larger scale networks. At that point I went down the path of doing the CCIE R&S written. Shortly after getting the written done, I got frustrated in the beginning of my lab studies and ended up quitting studying. Through the next couple of years, I did the DA/DP to beef up my resume, and because my job was design focused. Then, I started to work mostly on data center technologies. Initially, it was just some 5K/2K stuff but a little bit later, my org bought some FlexPods. So, I started to head down the DC path.
Before starting the DC studies, I did some F5 work so I did that cert because, why not? Company also paid for a week long ITILv3 boot camp so I attended that and knocked it out. In the middle of the DC track, the company was bringing in a trainer for NSX. We were seeing customer demand for it, and the agreement was to attend the class you had to get the cert. Time passed, and I got caught up in the exam update for VCP-NV to VCP6-NV. I had to take the foundations exam for VMware, and since I didn't have any real experience with VMware it took awhile.
Finally, after the VMware tests, and some hectic time at work, I went back to finish the CCNP DC this past winter. Work kicked up again, and got a major project done, then finally knocked out the CCIE DC written. Now, here I am. (Hopefully, that all made sense.)
Bottom line, for anyone new out there, I would recommend just picking a track you are interested in, or one you get tons of exposure to, and just go straight through to the CCIE, or get the "expert" level cert in whatever track/profession you interested in. It's worth a lot more to have one CCIE than all the certs after my name.
My two cents anyway.
58 Days till CCIE DC boot camp, and 139 (approximate) till first lap attempt.
57 Days till CCIE DC boot camp, and 138 days (approximate) till first lab attempt.
53 Days till CCIE DC boot camp, and 134 days (approximate) till first lab attempt.
Still working on getting UCS-D up at work. Issues in the lab at work have been delaying the deployment.
Continued to read up on Jumbo MTU, and QOS in general, for the Nexus 7K. That has been eye opening. Turns out there are two ways to get Jumbo MTU working on N7K with F-Series line cards: setting the mtu directly on the L2 to the same value as the "system mtu" command, and changing the network-qos setting in the admin VDC. Nice perk that the MTU shows up correctly on the interface for "show int eth X/Y."
Also, signed up for Kirk Byers e-course for learning Python. Also, read a few pages out of "Python for Dummies."
48 Days till CCIE DC boot camp, and 129 days (approximate) till first lab attempt.
My ultimate career goal: To climb to the top of the computer network industry food chain.
"Winning means you're willing to go longer, work harder, and give more than anyone else." - Vince Lombardi
Last night I wrote up three "blog" posts just in MS Word. They aren't published anywhere right now. I never have been a huge proponent of blogging. (I used to have a blog, and actually logged in last night. It's been four years since I posted.) Overall, I think writing up things that can become easily confused, or forgotten, probably is a good course of action to blog about.
For all of you who have attacked the CCIE, did you find blogging on topics to slow you down? I guess my primary concern is that I end up writing posts, and not studying more. (For the record, I don't consider TE posts blogging because usually they are succinct, and take the form of conversations.)
46 Days till CCIE DC boot camp, and 129 days (approximate) till first lab attempt
Thanks.
Need to figure out where to post what I am writing up.
45 Days till CCIE DC boot camp, and 128 Days (approximate) till first lab attempt.
I do like the structure that blogging can do for topics that you don't have a ton of experience. In addition, I can easily refer back to them instead of having to completely reacomplish figuring out how to bang it out.
45 Days till CCIE DC boot camp, and 128 Days (approximate) till first lab attempt.
Just keep churning.
42 Days till CCIE DC boot camp, and 125 Days (approximate) till first lab attempt.
Need to just keep churning.
29 Days till CCIE DC boot camp, and 112 Days (approximate) till first lab attemtpt.
The grind continues.
23 Days till CCIE DC boot camp, and 106 Days (approximate) till first lab attempt.
21 Days till CCIE DC boot camp, and 104 Days (approximate) till first lab attempt.
15 Days till CCIE DC boot camp, and (TBD) Days till first lab attempt. (Studies going slower than expected.)
https://code.visualstudio.com/
Maybe I use this to rewrite a tool that was originally written in TCL into Python at work. Should be a good challenge. We'll see. Making progress on the coding front.
14 Days till CCIE DC boot camp, and (TBD) Days till first lab attempt. (Studies going slower than expected.)
Been trying to lab up some VXLAN in GNS3. Went down the rabbit hole and spent an day on getting refreshed on multicast for the underlay replication. Funny how these little pieces of technology stack up, and you have to go back down that technology rabbit hole to verify what you thought. Not to mention if something doesn't look right you have to verify if it is you, or that you are using a virtualized platform, and that feature might not be working. Better to keep working at it than complain I can't get rack access.
5 Days till CCIE DC boot camp, and (TBD) Days till first lab attempt. (Studies going slower than expected.)
(TBD) Days till first lab attempt.
(TBD) Days till first lab attempt.
118 days until lab attempt.
111 Days till first lab attempt.
As a side note: if anyone is reading this, make sure you spend some quality time with the HTML5 UCSM interface. I used to curse Java. However, some times I would select items in UCSM (in the HTML5 GUI) and click apply, and the values would change from what I selected. There are some other anomalies I have found. Even if you are UCS rockstar on previous version it is worth your time to go through the motions with various labs/tasks just to make sure it works the way you think it should.
108 Days till first lab attempt.
The blade I am using is a B200 M2 so it's a little long in the tooth. Luckily a friend has an C-Series M3 server in his lab, so we can try the feature out with him.
As a side note, I have been working about 4+ hours every work day. During the weekends, it seems like I get in around 5 - 8+ hours a day. Still doesn't seem like it is going to be enough to hit my first test date successfully. The bottom line for me is that I need a little bit of a tight deadline to keep me motivated. If I have a test date that is 6+ months out I'll tell myself, "I can watch TV tonight, I have plenty of time."
105 Days till first lab attempt.
Back to labbing.
4 Days till first lab attempt.