A New CCIE Tool - Host VM

hey everyone charles judd here and in this video i want to take a look at a new resource for ccie studies that cisco has made available to us recently many of you know that i'm currently studying for ccie enterprise and if you're currently studying for this yourself or if you've even explored the possibility you understand the very wide range of topics that you need to master in order to prepare for the lab exam with the newest update we've gone from ccie route switch to ccie enterprise infrastructure and we have lots of new topics related to the future of networking things like virtualization network assurance and automation so the amount of information that you need to master alone can be quite overwhelming now if you're like me and you're a bit of a nervous test taker you can add in the fact that you have to actually travel to a physical lab location somewhere and use unfamiliar equipment to perform the lab well one of the things that cisco has done to ease at least some of that burden is they've released their ccie desktop environment as a virtual machine for anyone to download and use for their own studies this eliminates the variable of going in completely blinded to everything allowing you to acclimate to the environment that you'll be using on your lab day to perform the tasks so let's jump in and take a look at this resource so first we can find this actual resource in an article on the cisco learning network where we'll find the host vm available for download this should work in all major virtualization tools and you'll see that it consists of three different files that we need to download we have the manifest file we have the ovf file and we have the vmdk disk image these image files should work in all major virtualization platforms i actually have that installed in vmware but you can certainly use that in something like virtualbox as well or any number of other virtualization platforms that will support these file types now this virtual desktop does underscore one of the big changes to the ccie lab format from the perspective of the actual hardware that you'll be using during the exam in the new version of this ccie lab exam the actual lab equipment is extensively virtualized in fact aside from the catalyst 9300 series hardware switches used for the software-defined access portion of the lab topology all the other pieces of the topology are going to run as virtual machines including the host vm this piece that cisco has provided for our studies in the video description below i've added a link to the cisco learning network article where you can download this host vm for yourself again the total size is just over six gigs and when you install this we can see some of the technical details here if we install it and just leave everything to the default settings it's going to allocate two virtual cpus and two gigs of ram which is the minimum suggested hardware now you can run this with a single virtual cpu but you might find that the performance suffers so two v cpus is the recommendation and obviously the more resources you can allocate the better your performance is going to be now before we look at the host vm itself i'll also mention that as far as the physical desktop environment goes you will have two 24-inch monitors to work from and of course a typical qwerty keyboard and a mouse so no big surprises there that's been typical in past ccie labs as well now as for the host vm let's jump into that the first thing you'll likely notice is that as opposed to previous versions this desktop is no longer a windows based machine as it used to be this is now a custom linux distribution more specifically it's based on debian so this vm is going to be used to access things like vmanage and dna center to perform automation tasks and to troubleshoot the lab network so needless to say you do need to be familiar with working in linux which again is another great reason to leverage this host vm particularly if linux isn't something that you're super familiar with one of the main reasons for this change is that it seems to be the easiest way for cisco to implement many of the tools that are needed for the lab especially in regard to network automation and programming on the desktop you see that we have a wireshark instance here so that's available for network diagnostics if you're familiar with wireshark you know that we can really drill down into network traffic and get a very granular view of things so that's helpful we also see lx terminal which very simply is just a lightweight terminal emulator designed to take up a minimum amount of system resources if we open this you'll see that we are easily able to gain root access without any issues should you need to do that just below the lx terminal on our desktop we also see eclipse eclipse ide ide meaning integrated development environment so eclipse is essentially a place where we can use multiple programming languages actually as we prefer and we can consolidate our code writing so the difference between an ide and something like let's say notepad plus plus is that an ide is going to have a code editor it's going to have a compiler a debugger and several other features so this is much more than just a simple text editor and below that on our desktop we see postman postman is an api client that allows us to create and test apis if you'd like to learn more about how that works you can find a video detailing more about postman here on our channel and in fact i'll also go ahead and link that in the video description as well so let's close postman out and of course we have other tools available at our disposal if we look under our accessories we're going to see things like a calculator we see several editors here such as joey we also see midnight commander if we go down under the debian folder look under applications and editors we also have x edit under network communication we have telnet and xbiff if we jump down to our programming folder here you'll see that we have idle as well so lots more tools than just those on the desktop are at our disposal and you'll notice we have a firefox browser shortcut pinned to the desktop as well so this is going to give us access to some documentation that we are allowed during the exam and i've pulled up some of that here for us to look at we can of course access the cisco solution site we have the cisco support and documentation site and we'll also have some other pieces of documentation available to use as well such as the python documentation now one caveat here don't rely solely on being able to find whatever you need to do in the support or the documentation by all accounts there just isn't enough time available during the lab to rely solely on the documentation but this can be a really nice lifeline if you get stuck on something i would also say that you would definitely want to familiarize yourself with how this is structured you want to be familiar with using the documentation understanding how to navigate the documentation is probably the most important skill related to actually using the documentation because this documentation is vast you can quickly go down a rabbit hole so you want to understand how this works how it's structured and how to find things also know that as with the previous lab exams the documentation is going to be limited and redacted in certain areas so you won't have access to everything that you will from your home desktop on your lab day i would say that all things considered this is a really good resource that cisco has provided us with to gain some familiarity before we actually sit down on lab day i hope you found this content useful and i want to thank you sincerely for watching

Channel: Charles Judd

Views: 1,543

Keywords: cisco, ccie, cisco enarsi, ccie enterprise infrastructure, cisco enarsi 300-410, cisco encor 350-401, network programmability, ccie lab, virtual machine

Id: xDocN6xGHmI

Length: 8min 45sec (525 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021