Hardware for JNCIS (or higher) level studies

bermovick

Hey all,

I'm developing a rough draft of where I want my studies to go over the next few years, and I'm thinking the JNCIS and possibly JNCIP level exams are going to be on the list. I'm curious what hardware (if any) people would suggest for labs at these levels.

For the JNCIA, an olive or three seemed to work well enough, but I don't know if those will be sufficient once you start going deeper in; especially since I never really could get olives communicating well with each other or the rest of my network. On the other hand, I haven't really been able to find low-end juniper gear the same as you can find on the cisco side.

stuh84

For the JNCIS-ENT, I got through primarily using Olives. We have a couple of MX80's at work which I helped getting installed, but I didn't do anything on them I couldn't do on the Olives.

I did have to memorize the switching side though which I didn't like, would rather just play with it, but I have no access to any EX series gear so had to go with it.

For going further on though, I think you'd need an SRX or two, and any time on EXs would be almost mandatory I'd guess. If you had an SRX, and maybe a J-Series you could use Olives for the rest, covering all bases for commands. If you could somehow find an EX for a reasonable price, and then maybe use it with Cisco switches so you know how to get equivalent features working (obviously not Virtual Chassis and similar, but things like STP should be okay)

Thats about best I can say on it.