Cisco certification changes Feb 24th 2020

This affects a lot of people but for those of us enrolled in WGU: Network operations and Security it really affects us. I'd encourage you to reach out to your mentors to see if there is a plan yet for what will become of our degree plans. https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/training-events/training-certifications/next-level-certifications.html

Losing the CCENT, CCDA, and CCNA:S removes 16 credits from our term and possibly 22 credits depending on how ICND2 is treated in the degree. Yikes!

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MitM

the caveat is you have to have a very powerful system to do these tracks on gns3/eve

Iristheangel

Not necessarily. Many of these VMs support thin provisioning and the individual images dont take too much in terms of resources. ISE is probably the biggest vm in the bunch and running the eval specs isn't so bad.

Iristheangel

People have done it in Routergods with old Dell servers off eBay for wayyy cheaper than dedicated hardware. Spending $200-300 in a server that can be reused and repurposed for other studies is an efficient use of money for studying

MitM

yep, agreed. I meant more from a memory perspective, if you're trying to run a decent sized environment. ISE, FTD, FMC, etc

Doable for sure, no excuses, ABL

Hawk321

Iristheangel said:

Not necessarily. Many of these VMs support thin provisioning and the individual images dont take too much in terms of resources. ISE is probably the biggest vm in the bunch and running the eval specs isn't so bad.

With all respect, but a serious environment like 20 nodes needs a beast ! See the VIRL or EVE documentation ... I do have 3 DELL R620's here for my Proxmox cluster....an no ...containers are not really faster (in many aspects the opposite is true). I'm not sure what eve uses for its container ...if docker...than good night.

Also I don't understand why eve doesn't support Proxmox (which is a KVM frontend) and does not support Ubuntu Server newer than 16.04 LTS ...

Anyway, whatever one needs, it costs $$$. I did my Linux stuff on my localhosts hypervisor but was so limited compared to real rack servers. I spent around 5000 $ for my 3 racks and no ... a used 200$ ebay server does not work. Try to use a consumer grade SSD ...most raid controllers wont accepts them.
So deeper someone goes so more money he has to spent... sad but true.

At college I did a small project and build a classic 3 tier campus lan + some serial connection with my cisco hardware...heck even the cables costs 200 $.

Perhaps, you can list all the stuff needed for ccnp dc, sec. Not the cheap charly list and not the deluxe edition.

Iristheangel

Hawk321 said:

Iristheangel said:

Not necessarily. Many of these VMs support thin provisioning and the individual images dont take too much in terms of resources. ISE is probably the biggest vm in the bunch and running the eval specs isn't so bad.

With all respect, but a serious environment like 20 nodes needs a beast ! See the VIRL or EVE documentation ... I do have 3 DELL R620's here for my Proxmox cluster....an no ...containers are not really faster (in many aspects the opposite is true). I'm not sure what eve uses for its container ...if docker...than good night.
Also I don't understand why eve doesn't support Proxmox (which is a KVM frontend) and does not support Ubuntu Server newer than 16.04 LTS ...

Anyway, whatever one needs, it costs $$$. I did my Linux stuff on my localhosts hypervisor but was so limited compared to real rack servers. I spent around 5000 $ for my 3 racks and no ... a used 200$ ebay server does not work. Try to use a consumer grade SSD ...most raid controllers wont accepts them.
So deeper someone goes so more money he has to spent... sad but true.

At college I did a small project and build a classic 3 tier campus lan + some serial connection with my cisco hardware...heck even the cables costs 200 $.

Perhaps, you can list all the stuff needed for ccnp dc, sec. Not the cheap charly list and not the deluxe edition.

Take a look at the devnet and ccnp sec certification pages and blueprint. Ok. After you do that, let me know which VMs are stressing you out that will require thousands of dollars in server costs or where you can't use devnet sandboxes as substitute. If you read anything about the new exams, you'd know you didn't need to take every concentration to get the ccnp title.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/training-events/training-certifications/certifications/professional/ccnp-security-v2.html

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/training-events/training-certifications/certifications/devnet/cisco-certified-devnet-professional.html

I don't see anything on any individual exam list that requires 20+ VMs to learn and test on. That and a lot of the devnet certification topics could be practiced here for free: https://developer.cisco.com/site/sandbox/

Hawk321

I'm interested in DC:

https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/community/certifications/ccnp-data-center/dccor/exam-topics

2.0 Compute

25%

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2.1 Implement Cisco Unified Compute System Rack Servers

2.2 Implement Cisco Unified Compute System Blade Chassis

2.2.a Initial setup
2.2.b Infrastructure management
2.2.c Network management (VLANs, pools and policies, templates, QoS)
2.2.d Storage management (SAN connectivity, Fibre Channel zoning, VSANs, WWN pools, SAN policies, templates)
2.2.e Server management (Server pools and boot policies)

How can I learn that WITHOUT hardware ?

https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/community/certifications/ccnp-data-center/dcauto/exam-topics

How can I use a 200 $ server to train deployment in a serious environment ? I mean, I play around with 26 VM's at home to really feel Ansible and all the other stuff. Normal i7 is to limited.

Or how can I reproduce this kind of a lab on a 200$ server (ok, this example is extreme) ???

Oh, before I forget:
Did this cost you only 200$ ???

Iristheangel

I used the UCS emulator 100% for my CCNP Data Center. @joelsfood did the same thing I believe as well. On top of that, there's the free sandboxes you can use on Devnet. My CCNP was actually pretty cheap. My CCIE was the expensive part.

Here's the link to the Devnet labs: https://developer.cisco.com/site/sandbox/
And the UCS emulator: https://community.cisco.com/t5/unified-computing-system/ucs-platform-emulator-downloads-ucspe-4-0-4epe1-ucspe-3-2-3epe1/ta-p/3648177

chrisone

Iristheangel said:

I used the UCS emulator 100% for my CCNP Data Center. @joelsfood did the same thing I believe as well. On top of that, there's the free sandboxes you can use on Devnet. My CCNP was actually pretty cheap. My CCIE was the expensive part.

Here's the link to the Devnet labs: https://developer.cisco.com/site/sandbox/
And the UCS emulator: https://community.cisco.com/t5/unified-computing-system/ucs-platform-emulator-downloads-ucspe-4-0-4epe1-ucspe-3-2-3epe1/ta-p/3648177

UCS emulator for the win! When I was studying for DC track that is what I used. At the end of the day if you do not see the ROI on investing into your career, then don't pursue it.

bowmatty

Any idea how many questions are expected on the exam?

DFTK13

bowmatty said:

Any idea how many questions are expected on the exam?

I think it varies on the questions, i'd imagine it'd be around 50-60. They give us 120 minutes for it though. https://www.cisconetsolutions.com/ccna-exam-v1-0-200-301/

DFTK13

Hey guys, the kindle version of the CCNA 200-301 Vol. 2 OCG by Wendell Odom was just released today, the hard cover will be released on the 27th.

bowmatty

The CCNA 200-301 training modules are on https://www.itpro.tv/ if anyone is a member

DFTK13

If you haven't seen it already, CBT Nuggets just released new tutorial videos for the CCNA 200-301.

https://www.cbtnuggets.com/certification-playlist/Cisco/ccna-200-301

bowmatty

I feel the latest CCNA exam is going to be a suped up version of Network+ lol

Iristheangel

Agree with you, bowmatty, and I don't think I like it.

DFTK13

It seems that Cisco is focusing much more on the CCNP and CCIE tracks seeing how all the tracks for CCNA were chucked out the window. Honestly, it makes sense bc a lot of network engineer jobs or any job that has networking in it list CCNP as a minimum, at least as far as I’ve seen.

Lunchbocks

DFTK13 said:

It seems that Cisco is focusing much more on the CCNP and CCIE tracks seeing how all the tracks for CCNA were chucked out the window. Honestly, it makes sense bc a lot of network engineer jobs or any job that has networking in it list CCNP as a minimum, at least as far as I’ve seen.

That's how I see it as well.

spiderjericho

Has anyone used the lab VM?

https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/s/article/CCIE-Enterprise-Infrastructure-Host-VM

Or signed up for the upcoming webinars?