Juniper JNCIE-ER

blundgren77

Greetings,

I've passed the specialist exam for Juniper Enterprise Routing and I'm setting my sights towards the JNCIE-ER sometime in 2009. Has anyone taken it, or have any background on it? All that I've heard is that it's a killer, and there are only about 32 people world wide that have it. What's the format like? Is it similar to the CCIE? Pass/Fail rate? I've heard it's done using 8 J series routers, but can't confirm that either.

Any input would be appreciated!

Thanks!
--Bill

Aldur

I'm setting my sights on the ER-IE in 2009 as well and I've pretty much heard the same rumors as you. Supposedly its a killer and will break your brain. I've known ppl who are amazing in networking who have passed that exam but only after 4 tries. I think the best person to answer your questions would be zoidberg, he passed the ER-IE and said it was one of the most challenging tests he's ever taken.

JDMurray

Lots of Juniper talk in our Juniper discussion forum.

Aldur

JDMurray wrote:

Lots of Juniper talk in our Juniper discussion forum.

Good point, probably is the best place to ask a question like this.

zoidberg

Hi blundgren77,

It was an adventure... I'll say that much. To quickly answer some of the questions...

There are now 33 JNCIE-ERs, of which, I am proudly one

I haven't tried the CCIE yet, so I cannot compare the format. I do believe the way the exams are graded differ somewhat between Cisco and Juniper. Take a look at the JNCIP-M and JNCIE-M books to get a feel for the lab format. The Enterprise Routing book is focused more on instruction than lab preperation. It will of course still equip you with everything you need to know for the lab.

For the atmosphere, everytime I go do one of those exams in Sunnyvale, I have a complete blast! I was stressed like crazy the first time I went, but the proctor was awesome and made it a very fun and exciting experince. By the end, there was less of a "what am doing here? why am taking this exam?" feeling, to more of a "chillin' at Juniper and just playing with their toys" feeling.

Number of routers? I think there were a couple more than 8. J-Series? I assume they all were. It's possible that they could have snuck a M in there, but I had way too many things to do to, and a show ver on all the routers was not on that list

Pass/Fail rate? No clue. With so few numbers it prolly won't be an accurate measure anyways as I believe the majority are likely in-house Juniper experts who can recite the software guides from memory

zoidberg

I have said it broke my brain, but that might be a slight exaggeration. Keeping track of everything was a challenge though. On such a beautiful and sunny day in Calafornia, I kept looking at this seemingly endless list of tasks thinking, "why am I in this cubicle playing with routers and not on the beach?" It was a long exam, and apparently even longer before I had the chance to take it. In the end though, the number of tasks could also be seen as an advantage as missing a couple things may not hurt you as much when they grade it.

The difficulty was more in the length of the exam than in the tasks. The first half of the exam was pretty easy. Anyone with experience on the M/T track should say the same. The second half is all services. I'm a Service Provider guy, and do not get to play with all those features at work very often, so it wasn't as natural for me as the JNCIE-M tasks. I managed to get thru it though, so if you play with services frequently, you might find this part easy too? If you go through the Enterprise Routing book and understand everything in it and know how to config everything it talks about, you should be able to do this. Use the study guides available from the Fast Track program as well. The content overlaps, but the study guides throw some lab scenarios at you that will help prepare.

Sorry if my rambling got long winded. Hope that answers some questions without raising to many more. Feel free to ask away though.

PS: Thankfully, I somehow managed to pass on round 1 It definitely made the rest of the week the best "vacation" ever.

Aldur

zoidberg wrote:

PS: Thankfully, I somehow managed to pass on round 1 It definitely made the rest of the week the best "vacation" ever.

You were able to get the IE-ER on your first try! Zoidberg, your my hero!

Seriously though, that is extremely impressive and I would imagine that you probably are one of the few or the only one who has passed it on the first try. My hat's off to you sir.

blundgren77

Awesome. Thanks all for the information. I have several months to study, and decent access to J, M and EX series stuff, as well as Olive. Now I just have to stock up on coffee, mountain dew, and forget about a life for a while until test day. lol

I see where there is a boot camp offered occasionally by the guy that wrote the Enterprise Routing book. 5K and a trip to Florida for a week might not be all that bad, if I can get work to pay for it. 12 hours a day of Junos though might be a little much. lol

zoidberg

Thanks Aldur. I'm not sure I could have handled a round 2, so I was pretty stoked when I got the email. In fact, I still have that one saved on my BlackBerry

edit: can't speel

zoidberg

If you put in a few months study and have some good lab access you should be set. It took me a couple months. I jumped in pretty quick after I finished my JNCIE-M, so I had a rolling start. On that note, I would strongly recommend going thru the JNCIP-M book as well. It will give you a very solid foundation for some of the tasks you need for the JNCIE-ER, and presents it in a way that will familarize yourself with the format they use when you go for the exam. You can skip the IS-IS chapter as that's not covered in the Enterprise Routing track. Most of the JNCIE-M book would be overkill though. The chapters on Firewalls, Mcast, CoS might help, but I'd suggest focusing on the ER book.

A company paid trip to Florida would always be sweet. Or, even better, Amsterdam in January I didn't get a chance to try the bootcamp, and I haven't had the pleasure of being in a class taught by Doug, but I have heard good things. I had a chance to meet him and he's a nice guy and definitely knows his stuff. 12 hours a day with him and rack of equipment should prepare you for anything the lab will throw at you. Not only did he co-author the book, he helped develop the lab. So you'd be in very good hands.

Aldur

Zoidberg, you say it took just a couple of months of study, so 3 months? and how many hours a day on average did you spend studying? Did you have a full rack of J routers, if so how many?

Sorry for all the silly questions but I am in a very similar position you were in and I really would love to get the IE-ER.

btw, i have 5 j2300, 1 j4300, and a whole lot of olives.

zoidberg

I don't know. It's hard to quantify. I got the ER book just before May and gave the lab a whirl early July. While I was waiting for the book I did go thru the student guides again. Hours spent? Not so sure. My schedule was all over the place. Once it was down to crunch time in the last couple weeks there were some long nights and a some vacation days off work to try to focus. I'll try to give it some more thought and let you know.

Interestly, I think I may have missed you in Sunnyvale by a day or two when you went for your IP.

Practice rack had a M20, 3 M10s, a J4300, and a J6300. I didn't utilize it to it's full potential, but definitely used the Js to work out all the services. You've done the M track, so you obviously know all about initial config, RIP, OSPF, BGP, policies and resdistribution. Focus on L2/L3 services, FWs, ALGs, redundancy, failover, and recovery. There's some great chapters in the ER book and student guides on those topics.

zoidberg

Possible to move this thread to the Juniper forum? This is starting to grow well beyond the category of General Certification