CCNA Exam or ICND1 & ICND2

DerekAustin26

Which is the easiest route for certification?
CCNA Exam or the ICND1 & ICND2?

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bubble2005

For beginners it would be advisable to go the two route. The work load can be quite overwhelming for an entry networking technician. Despite the one shot test, IMO I will take the two route since i'm just getting into the networking field to build on what I know, and also because i'm novice in Cisco's networking environment.

DerekAustin26

Is the 640-822 the up-to-date version to study for?

luke_bibby

DerekAustin26 wrote: »

Is the 640-822 the up-to-date version to study for?

Yes - 640-822 is the ICND1 exam for the CCENT qualification

To answer your first question: I found that taking the two exam route has been much easier to balance, especailly with full time work. I didn't use any real equipment when studying for CCENT; I have access to IOS images at work so I just used them with GNS3 to practice routing configs. For the CCNA ICND2 exam i bought some real gear (2x 2950G switches, 1x 2620xm & 1x 2621xm routers) which has been a really big help in preperaring for ICND2 which i take later this month.

Hope that helped.

DerekAustin26

luke_bibby wrote: »

For the CCNA ICND2 exam i bought some real gear (2x 2950G switches, 1x 2620xm & 1x 2621xm routers) which has been a really big help in preperaring for ICND2 which i take later this month.

Hope that helped.

Thanks man,

If you dont mind me asking... Why did u buy the real equipment when you could use a virtual lab? I find the virtual lab is very useful and informative!

spaat

I took the two also. I used GNS3 for both and find that to be sufficient. Although having equipment does not hurt either as it can be used as the beginning of building up your equipment for CCNP if you decide to go for it.