Moving up the Juniper cert ladder, is the only option Juniper training

YuckTheFankees · July 2012

I'm beginning to study for the JNCIA and hopefully move up the certification ladder but the lack of training material besides the expensive Juniper training annoys me. I found about 3-5 Juniper books on Amazon but that's it. Once I get to the JNCIP-ENT and JNCIE-ENT certs, is my only training option Juniper's Official training classes?

JDMurray · July 2012

Realize that Juniper's official training courses are expected to be purchased by Juniper's customers (i.e., medium-to-large sized businesses) and not by individuals looking to learn about Juniper's products. Customer's earn training credits that are exchanged for the training of their employees. It's not evil; it's just business.

I do wish there was a Juniper equivalent of Packet Tracer, or an easy way to put FreeBSD and JunOS 10.x/11.x images on a VM with a "learning license" for those of us individuals who can't afford to buy a couple of SRXs. I really think Juniper has this capability in-house, and is really missing digging into the market by not releasing it to us masses. I wish someone in Juniper's leadership would look at how SJ increased the desirability of Apple's computers by making them easily affordable to educational institutions. Do the same for learning Juniper's products! <rant off>

xbuzz · July 2012

Yeh definitely. I dunno how often this goes on, but i'm guessing Juniper lose out to Cisco at least some of the time, due to the fact that employees are more likely to have specialised knowledge of Cisco, so companies would rather pay the extra for cisco knowing that their employees are trained specifically for their products.

Making Juniper training more readily available to everyone can only increase their market share. I'm sure the revenue brought in by cert training is miniscule in comparison to hardware sales.

In my opinion, they should be basically giving training away for free, or do schemes like some of the other manufacturers where you're only tested on Juniper specific technology/commands etc and forgo having to "re-test" in the areas of general networking theory that is already tested in cisco certs.

Aldur · July 2012

Yeah, I agree that the training classes, any training class for that matter, is a bit for an individual to shell out. There is a cheaper alternative though, the courseware can be bought and shipped directly to you. Still not the cheapest, but definitely much cheaper than a training class.

Buy Juniper courseware

JD, I agree with ya there too, would be nice if there was something similar to packet tracer. Juniper does have partnerships with quite a few colleges in which they are sent free gear to teach students on, so they are helping students get experience/training in that regards. But it would be so helpful for people to learn and pick up Juniper knowledge if there was something simple out there.

YuckTheFankees · July 2012

I've been thinking about going the Cisco route but since the ISP I work for uses Juniper, I thought Juniper would be a better idea..but the lack of training makes that hard. We have asked management if they could build a lab where we could study but the security department won't approve it

.

I just looked at some SRX equipment on Ebay, wow they're expensive...the cheapest piece of equipment was $500-700..but then again, I don't know the exact piece of equipment I would need to buy.

@Aldur,

I was looking at the coursework last night but I was a little confused. I saw most of the books were roughly $300, is each book for 1 certification or do I need to buy multiple books per certification? I'm leaning towards going down the Service Provider path, since I work for one ( or should I considered the ENT path?).

Aldur · July 2012

Yeah, that's an unfortunate realization, getting real Juniper devices to play on isn't cheap. I remember when I was first studying for the JNCIE-M, about 5 years ago. I ended up buying 9 J series routers on Ebay, which typically cost me around $900 a shot. Now I have a lab of about 9 srx devices. But you really don't need that much, I know guys who have studied for, and passed JNCIE certs with just srx devices.

Sure, it was a lot of capital to come up with to get that type of a lab together, but it was an investment in myself, and it has paid off over 100x over with the job opportunities that opened up because of what I learned and the certifications I was able to get.

Another alternative is Junosphere, which I know isn't the cheapest option either, but when compared with rack rentals, it's a much better option, and I know some people have had success with getting a VM srx device running, although I've never looked into it myself.

As far as your question about the courseware, each book you see listed is for a certain class, and each class might cover one certification or another, or sometimes more. For example, if you were looking at going the security route, I'd recommend picking up the JSEC courseware, which would cover you for the JNCIS-SEC exam, then you'd want to have the JSEC, AJSEC, JUTM, and JIPS books for the JNCIP-SEC exam, which would also cover you for the JNCIE-SEC exam.

If you work for a service provider, I'd definitely recommend going down the SP path, the material should be easier to learn, since you probably already understand service provider topics, and it'll directly help you with your work. That's exactly the path I took, learned the SP stuff first, my job at the time dealt only with SP Juniper gear, then did the ENT stuff, then on to the SEC stuff.

YuckTheFankees · July 2012

What type of equipment would you recommend for the SP route?

Aldur · July 2012

The cheapest is going to be the srx100B, albeit a router/firewall, it'll do most everything you need including VPLS. You just have to put it in packet mode. However, you can't setup an srx100 as a route reflector, you'll need at least a srx210 for that. And just checking ebay, the srx100s aren't much different, as far as price goes. And don't forget that you can virtualize each srx into multiple routers. However, I thought I heard somebody say here that you couldn't do MPLS in a routing instance, but I'm unsure if they put the srx in packet mode. In flow mode the srx just drops mpls packets.

YuckTheFankees · July 2012

I called Juniper about pricing for Junosphere but the sales rep literally knew nothing about it...besides it cost 1500.00 for 300 days. He told me to call CDW, Insight sales, or Dell to possibly get a better price. So far I called CDW, but they had no idea what Junosphere was.

How many of each piece of equipment is recommend? I'm probably going to buy the courseware for JNCIS-SP, do you know if they give recommendations on what devices to use to help supplement the material (in the courseware).

Aldur · July 2012

*sigh* sorry to hear about the Juniper rep not knowing much about it ... Kind of surprises me there... Oh well, below is a link that takes you to the part of the Juniper website that allows you to order Junosphere time using your credit card.

http://www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/software/junos-platform/junosphere/lab/#ordering

Also, one other thing I forgot to mention, the SRX boxes have some limitation as far as MX functionality, such as service provider switching/carrier Ethernet. And the JNCIS-SP exam covers this material, but the JNCIP-SP and JNCIE-SP does not. However, Junosphere does support this functionality.

As far a equipment needed, that's a tough one to answer, more is always better, but as far as the courseware goes, we use one j2320 router, and split it up into many virtual routers. You could easily use a srx210 for this functionality if it supports mpls in a virtual router, I can check on that for you and get back to you. Then there's two MX80/MX5 routers that the students control, you could use two srx 100s for this, again, the carrier Ethernet functionality would be lacking. The virtualized j2320 router allows us to create many virtual routers and really expand the topology.

So I would say to have at least 2 devices, and 3 would be better.

YuckTheFankees · July 2012

If I bought Junosphere, could I use that to lab for all Service Provider certifications?..even JNCIE-SP? After reading about Junosphere, I'm still confused about the product. Is it a program where I set up networks/topologies and I can use any type of Juniper equipment within those topologies?

Aldur · July 2012

I believe how it works (I've only used the internal Junosphere stuff in which I have to configure my own connections between routers) is that you figure out a topology, connections between routers, and types of routers, and you give that topology to the Junosphere people. Then, they setup the servers to run your topology. So, if you purchase 10 VMs you can have 10 MX routers running to fully run a JNCIE-SP lab. I believe that only restrictions, as far as router platforms go, is that the SRX functionality isn't quiet there yet. It's mostly there for the SRX but there are some features missing, like HA clustering. But, I believe that you can pick almost any platform, in your case, the MX platform would be best suited for SP studies.

Ahriakin · July 2012

Don't forget the fast-track materials. You can cover the first 2 levels from these alone (for free). You may not have the vast range of 3rd party material you do for Cisco but at least the Juniper training materials do a better job of covering the exam topics. For IE labs again you have less options for rental etc. but you can do more with less - my CCIE security lab had about 8 distinct components, so far my Juniper lab is 3 SRXs (2x100, 1x210h), it cost me much less even though individually most of the Cisco products were cheaper.

NightShade03 · July 2012

Ahriakin wrote: »

Don't forget the fast-track materials. You can cover the first 2 levels from these alone (for free). You may not have the vast range of 3rd party material you do for Cisco but at least the Juniper training materials do a better job of covering the exam topics. For IE labs again you have less options for rental etc. but you can do more with less - my CCIE security lab had about 8 distinct components, so far my Juniper lab is 3 SRXs (2x100, 1x210h), it cost me much less even though individually most of the Cisco products were cheaper.

Some good points here. I work for a Juniper partner and got two SRX100s for free and have been able to do all my studying and lab time with just those two devices.

JuniperGuy · July 2012

Yup, working in a large Juniper environment you can sometimes work out deals like that. I got a SRX100H as a "demo" then got my boss to order 25 SRX100B's for "evalutation" purposes (we have a network of about 6000 locations)

Our vendor is also pretty cool about it, he let's me buy personally at my companies discount level.

If there was enough interest in a group order of SRX devices, say 100B or H, I might be able to work a deal with him to get some deep discounts in.

Aldur · August 2012

Man, that's cool that you are getting them at a good discount, back in the day when I picked up my srx100s I really wish I could have got them at a discount like that.

Moving up the Juniper cert ladder, is the only option Juniper training

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