CCIE Enterprise: How to Study SD-Access Without Breaking The Bank

hey everyone so yesterday cisco put on a ccie webinar for the enterprise infrastructure lab and it was called you know build your own lab and beyond um it was a good webinar and i do recommend watching it especially if you're going for the ccie enterprise infrastructure lab exam but i put together this blog post and i'll put it in the description and in this blog post i took a lot of screenshots and one of the most um i would say contentious you know points maybe the point that brought up the most discussion was hardware requirements and what specifically is going on with software-defined access so you could see in these hardware requirements here um ice the identity services engine is eight cpus and 64 gig of ram which is pretty hefty and then to dwarf that we actually have the dna center appliance which is 88 virtual cpus and 256 gig of ram holy cow right so to make things even worse um if we scroll down further you could see the non-virtualized part of the lab now consists of sda switches because there's no images available to emulate the cat catalyst 9000s and then also dna center virtualization is not officially supported and it requires huge resources to run which we just saw for the sda part here you could see that you know it must be physical like i just said and then here are the different switch options but you know these cat 9k switches are really expensive um not necessarily i mean for your business but for your personal lab these are crazy you're not just going to pick up a couple couple off ebay for 20 bucks um so the the point here is that sda it's only probably about 12 to 15 of the exam but it is way more expensive than anything else in the entire you know blueprint so cisco has kind of said you know maybe they'll do some rack rentals but who knows when that's going to come out or how expensive that'll be also internally they're researching ways to make this all digital but you know again who knows how long that's going to be so today april 8th 2021 i want to show you what i consider to be the best and most importantly most affordable resources there are to la well let's say lab but we're good to study sda to use um on the ccie lab exam so in the the webinar one of the things he said was that we will need to know the underlay configuration you know it's going to be very important so the best way i think and if you go on lean pub again i'll put this in the description from tim mcconaughey he has four books on the sda underlay now the first book is the lisp vxlan basic workbook and then there's the solutions guide and then the expanded word book and the expanded solutions guide uh there's two bundles for them so i'm just going to click in you know one of the bundles just so you can kind of see the price and it's 19 for the full bundle right so you get both the bundles this will go over basically the entire sda underlay configuration um i think well worth it you know i don't i don't know of anywhere else that kind of has this for this price especially because there's not a lot of workbooks out there for the ccie enterprise you know to be fair so again i will put tim's lean pub page in the description and you can scroll down and you can grab both bundles now for the actual dna center part of it um let's take a look at videos so the the absolute cheapest way would be to come in here to lab minutes and you can see this is the first video in the series which is sda fundamentals part one and you can download the video for 17 or you can just watch it right so this is free there's no account i'm not logged in or anything you can see up here there's no login or anything like that it's just free and on the rest of his page um i didn't mean to open him in a new window but regardless you could you know come in here to videos again i'll link this below and you can see all these sda videos um and there's three pages worth of it so again free great way to actually see the product in use the other videos would be um kbits.live so he has a subscription plan that's a hundred dollars for the whole year and in this you have this implementing sda course this is hours of video of core going through all of this dna center stuff i mean this is a lot of video so more expensive than the free one obviously from lab minutes but the reason why i wanted to bring this up because in this there's tons of other videos obviously including sd-wan so if you're looking to tackle the sd-wan and sd access portion of the lab for a hundred bucks to have a year you know a yearly subscription and get all these videos feels like it's worth it all right so now we're at a hundred bucks plus you know maybe forty dollars for tim's books we're at 140 bucks not too bad now the only thing i'm missing is that i'm not actually getting hands-on so for free it's if you go to devnet search for dna center click on sandbox you'll see there are a few sandboxes including the always-on sandbox so i just happen to be in it right now um it requires no reservation you could pop in and at least click around again this doesn't really fix all the problems of i'm not going to be able to provision you know a fabric myself i'm not really setting up a lab myself you know whatever but considering that this is only 12 of the exam maybe 15 of the exam i feel like this is going to be okay um doing tim's workbook for the underlays watching the videos and then getting actually in here to like click around i feel like you're gonna get mostly there now would i rather have a appliance with the switches and be able to do it all myself there's no question so if you have that in your environment or you use it at work then this video is going to be useless for you just go ahead and do that but if you're someone like me who's staring down you know oh gotta buy these switches for thousands of dollars i gotta get these ridiculous hardware resources for again more thousands and thousands of dollars i feel like spending a hundred and forty dollars here and then maybe the 1600 bucks on a lab lab exam attempt really is not that bad compared to how much money you would have to spend to actually lab it fully um i i think this is a pretty good plan um again this is in april so if if you're watching this video in december of 2022 or something and cisco has come out with a virtualized dna center that works in your esxi or even g you know whatever again as of today this is in my opinion the best way to study software to find access i will put all of these links in the video description if you know of more stuff or a better way to learn it please let me know i guess i shouldn't say before i uh sign off if you are a cbt nuggets member cbt nuggets does have an sda course i didn't put them in this video because quite frankly k bits is cheaper and uh lab bit lab minutes is also cheaper and i just also trust both those things um no offense to cbt they're actually great and the guy who does the sd access course is fantastic um just for the price point i think this is is really you know my plan is going to get you there cheaper so again please leave any comments um questions discussion points below i look forward to your feedback and thanks for watching this video we'll see on the next one

Channel: Michael O'Brien's CCIE Journey

Views: 9,073

Keywords: CCIE, SDA, SD-Access, DNAC

Id: QymOLEB7uhs

Length: 9min 30sec (570 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 08 2021