CCIE and VCDX in 5 year?

Hey guys,

Been giving this a ton of thought as to my choice of goals I want to accomplish for me and my career. Giving my level of insanity as it is right now with my study, can someone please tell me if it's possible well doable to get my CCIE R&S and VCDX either 5.5 or 6.0 in the next 5 years or sooner?

I know some will be like get your CCNA and CCNP or my VCIX 1st but I'm already set in my mind that I want them both, not matter what it takes to get them....

Am I hoping for too much or could this be obtainable? Can some share the level of commitment I will need to accomplish this goal?

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shodown

its pretty much up to you and your current lifesystle. There are people who got multiple CCIE's that had very little over lap in 2-3 years
So to get a CCIE and VCDX in 5 years is doable, but is the cost worth it to you. You could pop adderall everyday and study like a mad man and make it through the exams in 2 years, but the cost would be your health and sex drive, and family. Is it worth it????

networker050184

Sure it's doable. Just depends how much effort you put into it. It is just passing exams after all. Is it the best idea or will you actually end up an expert in both technologies? I think that's the bigger question. And if you already have your mind set then really who cares what we have to say?

Good luck!

Deathmage

shodown wrote: »

its pretty much up to you and your current lifesystle. There are people who got multiple CCIE's that had very little over lap in 2-3 years
So to get a CCIE and VCDX in 5 years is doable, but is the cost worth it to you. You could pop adderall everyday and study like a mad man and make it through the exams in 2 years, but the cost would be your health and sex drive, and family. Is it worth it????

Well me and my fiance are study-aholics, she's working on her 2nd Master Degree program for medical school and her being Vietnamese, less just say the sex drive is not a problem...

I'm willing to make sacrifices and I already talked to her about it and she's all game...She has at-least 3 years with her Master's degree herself. Our family and fun life is we both play video games together and were both scientific nerds.

networker050184 wrote: »

Sure it's doable. Just depends how much effort you put into it. It is just passing exams after all. Is it the best idea or will you actually end up an expert in both technologies? I think that's the bigger question. And if you already have your mind set then really who cares what we have to say?

Good luck!

Contrary to the fact, I've been on this forum so long I highly value everyone opinion on subjects. I respect everyone opinions a great deal as you all have had such an impact on me these past few years.

Dakinggamer87

I would go for it if it meets your end goals because realistically why do we do certifications.

The piece of papers are nice but it's the knowledge and skills we gain from them and having a better understanding of what we are servicing/maintaining on a daily basis is the key. Simply put I always consider my health/work life balance first and foremost as life is short before degrees/certs.

I would say go for it because it's your life and if it gives you personal/professional satisfaction then do it!! The ball is in your court as far as the decision to pursue these certs hehe...

Claymoore

I believe that you can do it. However, I don't believe that these certs will have the same value in 5 years that they do today. With the uncertainty of the VMWare/EMC/Dell merger, Cisco's rocky last couple of years, and the overall move to cloud computing, do you think the certs will be worth the 5 years of sacrifice?

Polynomial

Is there any benefit to having both? What's the ROI here?

Employers are going to pay well for experts in either technology.

networker050184

Claymoore wrote: »

However, I don't believe that these certs will have the same value in 5 years that they do today.

Great point. I've always thought of certification as short term 1-3 year goals at most. You don't know what technology is going to look like down the road, what vendor's new product is hot, etc.

TheProf

Definitely doable... But unlike a CCIE, if you're going for your VCDX, you would need design experience, as most of the VCDX submissions are based on real life design... Fictitious designs don't seem to do that well from what I hear...

I would recommend that if you have the opportunity to do a full vSphere design, this includes Network, storage, compute, and hypervisor, take it! It will help you out a lot on the design document.

Deathmage

TheProf wrote: »

Definitely doable... But unlike a CCIE, if you're going for your VCDX, you would need design experience, as most of the VCDX submissions are based on real life design... Fictitious designs don't seem to do that well from what I hear...

I would recommend that if you have the opportunity to do a full vSphere design, this includes Network, storage, compute, and hypervisor, take it! It will help you out a lot on the design document.

My current employer I did do that....

This company was on a aging and dying infrastructure that was completely moved to a VMware N+3 cluster by myself solo in 2 week with only 20 minutes of unforeseen downtime and minimal performance hits.

I designed the networking from a flat /24 to a 16 vLAN network with a /20 sized VLSM'd network (Dell N3024's at the time as the collapsed core/distro with N2048 stack of (4) switches for L2 with (5) 250ft IDF's on Dual EC trunks) - now the core layer has Cisco 3750E's with a Dual Equalogic SAN storage with OOB fabric. The deployment of a Dual FT DMZ firewall configuration with (2) WAN VPN tunnel connections over 1200 miles away. On top of this did a successful migration from Windows Server 2000 Native to Server 2008 R2. Last month I completed a 250 client deployment with Terminal Services for 250 Wyse Thin Clients

Needless to say I basically did it all in the home-lab 1st and then carried it over to the work network and the design from home was moved to the design at work and it worked flawlessly...I had the same level of hardware at home as I did at work so it was perfect, except I had a NAS and work had a SAN, the same principles of storage applied.

networker050184 wrote: »

Great point. I've always thought of certification as short term 1-3 year goals at most. You don't know what technology is going to look like down the road, what vendor's new product is hot, etc.

This is something that always worries me but I do think having a CCIE would be valuable regardless. Having a good understanding of network flow is still the framework of the cloud.

Claymoore wrote: »

I believe that you can do it. However, I don't believe that these certs will have the same value in 5 years that they do today. With the uncertainty of the VMWare/EMC/Dell merger, Cisco's rocky last couple of years, and the overall move to cloud computing, do you think the certs will be worth the 5 years of sacrifice?

I'll be completely honest, in 2 years even with a CCNP and VCIX on my track towards the top certs of those companies I will have outgrown my current employers network. So with that being said I think my ideal location would be a cloud-based datacenter or a much large networking footprint. So even then I still think these certifications in those environments will still be valid.

For SMB's I do think the cloud is where they will go, but the companies that provide those cloud based services will still have a need for high-level engineers. I just think the employment of localized SMB's for a 1 to 3 man IT department are things of the past....

Being a manager of a company that has a cloud footprint is not the side of IT I want to do. I'm way too technical to be a button masher.

OctalDump

Yeah, but more realistic to choose 1, or to aim for CCNP/VCDX or CCIE/VCAP. I guess if you went the VCDX-NV route they'd be closer.

It also depends on where you are at now. CCNP in under a year from say, Net+, level is certainly doable. There's a program I am aware of, which will get you multiple CCNA (R+S, Collab, Wireless, Security) and CCNP R+S in under a year. Classes on weekends/evenings, and a lot of homework.

VCP to VCAP in under a year is probably also quite achievable. Not sure about that next step up. It's entirely possible that you could get both done in much less than 5 years.

I guess it also depends on how you frame your goals, if it's "I'm reaching for this, which I know will be hard, but it's ok if I come up short" or "If I don't get this, I have failed". Part of that is also letting the journey inform you as you go, being flexible to change as you learn about what the journey actually is. You might get to CCNP and realise "This is actually really more than I need. I am ok here" or "This security stuff is much more interesting, I think I'll look at that", or get that first VCAP and think "This study is killing my enjoyment for the subject. I'm just going to play around a bit and have fun."

techfiend

Lofty goals indeed, personally I think taking on smaller reasonable goals works out better and allows for detours. As certs are the one thing we have complete control of, depending on financials, it's easy to keep pushing and get ahead of your experience.

I envy your experience, I've designed two smallish, high available systems but never had a chance to implement or experience them implemented. Something I'd love to do regularly some day. VCDX and CCDP is likely in my future but I'm not aiming for them yet, mainly focused on getting the experience to catch up with certs. VCP-DCV is starting to burn me out but I'll stick with it till it's passed.

Deathmage

Perhaps my dreams are too much of a fantasy. I do agree 5 years is a long time to project in IT. Perhaps CCNP and VCAP/VCIX is a more obtainable goal for the intern.

I don't really envy myself with my experiences, I still think I don't have enough experiences in IT. But I guess I'm better off than most, so that does bring things into perspective for me Techfiend.

As for getting bored along the way my biggest problem is getting bored not learning, I'm like a information sponge. My biggest issue with my CCNA study currently is I already do CCNP level stuff at work and I just figured it out on my own. CCNA level stuff while essential is like lesser of what I've been doing for the past 2 years so when I learn I always, always study past CCNA level cause I love learning more....when I see 'out of scope' of this certification I'm like well f*ck why? "/slamsheadondesk -...F'ing Gnome Rogues why where they invented"... but I think if anyone follows me my home-labs and Packet tracers are way more complex than CCNA level....if that's a precursor of how my brain thinks then I guess that gauges where I want to go...

TheProf

Nothing wrong with aiming high, if it were easy, everyone would be doing it right?

In all seriousness, I think the most important thing to understand is the amount of knowledge that you have to have to pass these certifications. I am not a network specialist, but I have worked with Cisco kit in the past, done configurations, deployments, troubleshooting and even at the CCNA level, you have to have some solid understand of the core principals... I failed my CCNA twice back in the day, passed on third attempt. Of course back then, the CCNA did not have as much content as it does today it seems.

Anyways, whether it's 5 years or 10 years, at some point, I am sure you'll come back to the same question and ponder whether you should go for CCIE or VCDX, or both... I think it will strongly depend on your current situation, i.e if you're more of a telecom guy vs datacenter guy or both. Higher up you go, chances are, you'll become more specialized unless you strongly focus on being a very good generalist.

Deathmage

TheProf wrote: »

Nothing wrong with aiming high, if it were easy, everyone would be doing it right?

In all seriousness, I think the most important thing to understand is the amount of knowledge that you have to have to pass these certifications. I am not a network specialist, but I have worked with Cisco kit in the past, done configurations, deployments, troubleshooting and even at the CCNA level, you have to have some solid understand of the core principals... I failed my CCNA twice back in the day, passed on third attempt. Of course back then, the CCNA did not have as much content as it does today it seems.

Anyways, whether it's 5 years or 10 years, at some point, I am sure you'll come back to the same question and ponder whether you should go for CCIE or VCDX, or both... I think it will strongly depend on your current situation, i.e if you're more of a telecom guy vs datacenter guy or both. Higher up you go, chances are, you'll become more specialized unless you strongly focus on being a very good generalist.

I think sooner or later I'm going to be focused on either Cisco or VMware but be a generalist between Cisco/VMware/Microsoft/Storage with a dabble in Security since they all ties into each other in some fashion or another.

Like I'm such a quick learner that most specializations of what I've done at my last two employer's would normally take a dedicated VMware, Microsoft, Network Engineer to design, configure and deploy and I've done it solo by myself at both employments and successfully. Each time getting better and better at minimal downtime to the operations. If that makes me a generalist then I guess that's what I am. I'm just now trying to push deeper into the realm of specialization. Having these overall experience though have helped me visualize the full spectrum of a IT infrastructure from point A to Point Z.

I do think this though, this forum has made me think differently in how I do IT. Reading everyone's posts and topics does impact how I do IT. This forum should be a certification upon itself.

TheProf

Deathmage wrote: »

I think sooner or later I'm going to be focused on either Cisco or VMware but be a generalist between Cisco/VMware/Microsoft/Storage with a dabble in Security since they all ties into each other in some fashion or another.

Probably... After all, the way I see it, to be a strong Virtualization specialist, you have to have a solid understanding of Storage and Networking, all three go together right?

At some point, I started creating a VCDX design document, I put in about 30 pages so far, but I can tell you, I must have read 3-4 books just on storage to have a better understand of various design considerations and the impact those decisions have on the design itself. There's sooooo much to know, it's almost overwhelming, but again, all that knowledge needs to come from experience and it just goes to show, why not everyone can do the certification.

Deathmage

TheProf wrote: »

Probably... After all, the way I see it, to be a strong Virtualization specialist, you have to have a solid understanding of Storage and Networking, all three go together right?

At some point, I started creating a VCDX design document, I put in about 30 pages so far, but I can tell you, I must have read 3-4 books just on storage to have a better understand of various design considerations and the impact those decisions have on the design itself. There's sooooo much to know, it's almost overwhelming, but again, all that knowledge needs to come from experience and it just goes to show, why not everyone can do the certification.

Completely agree. The Storage + certification in September, while considered by some a low-end certification really filled in gaps in terms of storage. Helped me make better choices for our Veeam Backup Solution and OOB fabric deployments with suggestions from this forum.

TheProf

Good move on bridging the gaps in Storage+!!! Many people tend to miss the basics, but it's really important to have that foundation.

Sometimes I wonder why I didn't do the cert earlier in my career... Maybe it's not too late, but I feel like storage is one of my strong skills, However, I am more focused on vendor certs rather than vendor neutral, but hey, Storage + can't hurt either I guess

Deathmage

TheProf wrote: »

Good move on bridging the gaps in Storage+!!! Many people tend to miss the basics, but it's really important to have that foundation.

Sometimes I wonder why I didn't do the cert earlier in my career... Maybe it's not too late, but I feel like storage is one of my strong skills, However, I am more focused on vendor certs rather than vendor neutral, but hey, Storage + can't hurt either I guess

Many tell me that I should specialize, the problem I feel is being across all realms of IT in regards to a VCP, CCNA, and MCSA to me those are fundamentals, once you have them then you can truly specialize. But maybe I'm an over achiever...

Storage + is EOL Jan 16th, hence why I did it right after CCENT in August.

networker050184

A lot of people are like that when they start out, all over the board, wanting every cert for every technology they play with for 10 minutes at work. I was the same, lots of people come through here the same through the years that I've been here. You'll eventually get to the point where you can't keep up with it all and will need to pick something if you want to be an expert. Sooner you realize that and get at it the better for you I think.

Deathmage

I hear everyone, I think maybe a better option is to get the CCNP and VCIX and then decide what I want to do....since I find i love networking and VMware.

Microsoft I'm finding is really, honestly point and click. Now I'm sure by saying this some MCSE will get pissed but it's just my opinion on Microsoft, or maybe it's because nothing new has changed in it in 10+ years...

TheProf

Deathmage wrote: »

I hear everyone, I think maybe a better option is to get the CCNP and VCIX and then decide what I want to do....since I find i love networking and VMware.

Microsoft I'm finding is really, honestly point and click. Now I'm sure by saying this some MCSE will get pissed but it's just my opinion on Microsoft, or maybe it's because nothing new has changed in it in 10+ years...

I think the point and click is changing... Microsoft is starting to do some really cool things with Powershell. The question I am asking myself, when am I going to fully adapt and automate my day to day work activities with Powershell (and believe me, in VDI, you can do wonders with Powershell). Just the other day I was reading about PowershellDirect where you can manage the Hyper-V VM without it even having network access.

Really cool things are happening with Microsoft in Server 2016, looking forward to it.

Deathmage

Ya Powershell is something I'm using more and more in VMware, might look into a bootcamp on Powershell. looks like automation can be really handy.

But on the flip side my friend at AT&T at the datacenter in Westchester, whom I went to college with when we both got our BA in CS, said they are getting rid of Cisco 6504's, literally throwing them in dumpsters for newer models. He was like do you want one, I was like "you'd do that" he was like sure I see your lab, I figured you'd like it. His boss said for him to 'get rid of them' ...So he's dropping off a full rack with 3 X6748-GE in it.

Now to figure out where the frig I'm going to put it, I had no idea what the frig a 6500 was, so I looked it up online, it's bloody huge!

Dakinggamer87

Deathmage wrote: »

Many tell me that I should specialize, the problem I feel is being across all realms of IT in regards to a VCP, CCNA, and MCSA to me those are fundamentals, once you have them then you can truly specialize. But maybe I'm an over achiever...

Storage + is EOL Jan 16th, hence why I did it right after CCENT in August.

I actually feel the same way as you do as that is what I decided early on in my career. I think it's important to have a solid foundation across many different disciplines with IT. Afterwards, you can then specialize or refine the areas you enjoy and find fulfillment.

Nothing wrong with being an overachiever.

I think the majority on this forum are of the same mindset.

TheProf

Nice!!

philz1982

Deathmage wrote: »

Ya Powershell is something I'm using more and more in VMware, might look into a bootcamp on Powershell. looks like automation can be really handy.

Just get the two powershell in 30 lunches books and work through them. You'll get all the info you need to know.

Deathmage

philz1982 wrote: »

Just get the two powershell in 30 lunches books and work through them. You'll get all the info you need to know.

http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Windows-PowerShell-Month-Lunches/dp/1617290211/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1449176273&sr=8-2&keywords=powershell+in+30+lunches

??

philz1982

This one, http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Windows-PowerShell-Month-Lunches/dp/1617291080/ref=dp_ob_title_bk

And this one

http://www.amazon.com/Learn-PowerShell-Toolmaking-Month-Lunches/dp/1617291161/ref=pd_bxgy_14_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=1KJ8KPE6500MMM8AY4B3

OctalDump

Deathmage wrote: »

I hear everyone, I think maybe a better option is to get the CCNP and VCIX and then decide what I want to do....since I find i love networking and VMware.

Microsoft I'm finding is really, honestly point and click. Now I'm sure by saying this some MCSE will get pissed but it's just my opinion on Microsoft, or maybe it's because nothing new has changed in it in 10+ years...

Sounds like you'll have CCNP by mid next year. What are you going to do for the next 4.5 years?

I think maybe CCNP, and then get deeper into SDN, virtualisation etc. It seems like a more natural path, and will allow you to pursue expert in VMware whilst building up very relevant, and deeper, network skills. That interface between regular old networking, and virtualised networks, is going to be an interesting area. At some point there is going to a big shift where the virtual layer is dominant, and it will be the people that can architect that layer - compute/net/storage - who will be at the centre of infrastructure.

If you get a lot of experience with networking in that world, there will likely be a CCIE to fit. I'd hope within your 5 year time frame.

MCSE level is more abstracted, higher level, than MCSA. It does assume pretty broad experience in the MS world, which is probably harder to get than deep experience in a single area. But the abstracted nature of it, probably does make it a little easier to think through the answers rather than having to know lots of specific details of a technology.

I think it takes a bit of a different mindset from just being a technician to do this architect/design stuff. It's quite a bit less concrete, less tangible.

OctalDump

philz1982 wrote: »

This one, http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Windows-PowerShell-Month-Lunches/dp/1617291080/ref=dp_ob_title_bk

And this one

http://www.amazon.com/Learn-PowerShell-Toolmaking-Month-Lunches/dp/1617291161/ref=pd_bxgy_14_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=1KJ8KPE6500MMM8AY4B3

Great, more books to buy... or at least add to a long wishlist.

Deathmage

I take ICDN2 again on Saturday. After I pass it I'll be doing a dual VCP6-DCV study with Rob and then he's helping me with CCNP.

VCP6-DCV and CCNP are my goals for 2016. Want MCSA/MCSE but I'll just wait till 2016 and in the intern getting better at Powershell.