Jahsoul's CCNP Voice Thread

I've decided to create a thread to chronicle my CCNP Voice journey and wanted to keep all my little tidbits, notes, thoughts, and questions centralized on this one thread.

Background
I was studying for my CCNP Voice last year but life happened. Fast forward to now, and I'm finally feeling ready to jump back into it and get my NP Voice. I only have to take 4 exams because I passed QoS 2 years ago, but since I haven't really touched it since then, CVOICE is given me a change to brush up. I still have my CVOICE notes from last year so I'm going to use those while labbing and take the first exam August 24th.

Approach Philosophy
When I first decided to get into IT and networking more specifically, I met a CCIE on a Supra Forum (Supramania FTW). I asked him for advice and what he told me stuck with me from then until now. He told me that I should approach studying and labbing with where I want to go and not necessarily where I am. So, in moving forward, I'm building a lab for the CCIE Collaboration, from hardware to software, mostly and using the blueprint for a lot of the studies. I eventually want to get my CCIE but I'm taking a cert break next year and approach it slowly. But yeah, that goes into the next thing..

Where I'm At Now and Where I'm Going
I approaching this with a quality over quantity mindset. The amount of hours that you put in don't mean nothing if they aren't quality. That being said, I'm not giving myself a time limit. When I feel ready, I'm going to take each exam. I don't know how long that will be but my study hours will be around 6-8hrs a day on the weekends and 6 hours on Saturday. I'm also dedicating an hour a day to learn Perl, but that's another topic. Once I get situated, I will take pictures of the lab because it's just sitting in a corner in my room now and I'm still working on getting the server like I want it. I'm still piecing it together but I'll have it up more sooner than later.

Well, that's possibly it for the night but I'm looking forward to this.

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Comments

pitviper

Best of luck - looking forward to some posts of progress in the months to come!

bobfromfpl

What material will you be using?

For a good quality experience, I think INE Instructor Mark Snow did a fantastic job. He starts at CVOICE and works through CAPPS. You setup the lab environment as you go, so you can watch him and configure at the same time. While this won't answer all the test questions for the exam it provides a solid foundation for Voice experience. I think their price is 299$ right now and if you choose to buy their CCIE material you can get the 299$ discounted from the CCIE material purchase, can't go wrong there!

Good luck, hope we can assist

aaron0011

Best of luck, Voice is a fun and rewarding track. Have you or do you currently work(ed) with any Cisco VoIP technologies?

ccnpninja

Good luck

jahsoul

Man, it seems like forever. Life has really been kicking me in my butt......

*Adjusting to new location
*Wife expecting #4 (yes, after this, I'm "retiring")
*Unexpected surgeries and
*Placed into a different role at work
*Moving
*Having to go back home and pick up the rest of my stuff
*etc, etc, and etc

But out of all that, life is good. I've finally settled into my new place and got back to studying. Had major upgrades to the lab and everything is set and racked. All I really need to do now is perform clean installs of the servers, which will probably end up being spread out over the course of 2 to 3 weekends, and just keep my face in the books.

@shodown - I still got you (you know what I'm talking about)

shodown

Congrats on baby#4. What new job did you land?

jahsoul

shodown wrote: »

Congrats on baby#4. What new job did you land?

Thanks. Pretty much almost the same thing. I'm handling more front end video activation with a dedicated customer. While I'll rather be doing more, the new team has some good people and I guess it brings "visibility." lol

*Study/Lab Update*
I think part of my note taking will be to create flash cards during my reading and not from my notes. This is taking up a lot of time. But then again, I take notes on every small detail, so I have over 120 questions and I'm not a 5th of the way through.

Set up cabling and routing on the routers and was about to install CUCM and forgot to make to make the install disk bootable so I'll be handling that today and then back to business. Next plan is to get some better cooling for the office.