CCIE Tools and Prep Materials

life something goes wrong I have terrible luck with live streams so I'm gonna sit here and watch and just make sure that everything comes to life like I expect it to hit me up in comments now chat now if you can hear me and you can see me okay and once I know that I'm live and things are not bombing out on me like they always do I will make sure that we dive into this okay so things look like they're going well with a live stream at this point so let's just jump right into this shall we what a week it's been oh my gosh what a week it's been I committed fully to going for my CCIE I've got the time I've got the bandwidth I'm ready I've got the energy I've got the motivation and so many people reached out to inspire me and motivate me and tell me just really kind words motivation offered to help and I cannot thank you all enough in fact that's one of the key tools towards going for your CCIE is having a community a support group around you and we are going to talk about that in just a second let me first wrap up by telling you how the week went I committed to it on Monday and then I went through some things to make sure that I'm making progress towards it I am recording bgp content for the NRC exam and I like to think that ongoing just a layer beyond what the NRC exam calls for and I think that actually helps towards preparation for your CCIE so let me talk to you about that in just a moment I already got a good question can I know what your timeline is for the CCIE I'd love to knock it out in a year and I talked about that when we broke down the exam outline on Wednesday so I think that goes into the next thing I made a couple other videos that show progress towards it this week I think that was cool we broke down the exam topics I'm going to talk about that again in just a moment and then I also sat in the webinar where we where they explained what the actual lab environment is like now to 24 inch monitors multi-tab terminal connections the exact exam formats the types of questions and I posted I created a live stream about - so next week I think is going to be the big week next week they have a webinar on Wednesday about what the exam content actually is what's on the exam and how to prepare for it so let's jump into some demos here and talk about what tools I'm using to make this stuff work let's jump over to the screen and bring up some pages okay first things first is a community you need to have a support group you need to be having these people who are motivating you and sharing the journey with you going through the same things you can see right here I made a post last night on the CCIE reddit page let me change my color real quick so that way you can actually see this there we go yeah much better right here I made that post saying that I'm starting my CCIE journey and I think it's gonna be really cool a lot of people started communicating and chatting with me about how I'm preparing for it and that's what this video is all about the next thing that I'm doing to share my CCIE journey with the community is the CBT Nuggets community if your CBT Nuggets subscriber there is a slack community you can go to CBT Nuggets comm slash community and you can join in and it's categorized by topics and people who are in there and they're just you know a lot of time they're just you know shooting a gun and hanging out but they're also talking a lot about like the encore exam there's even a couple CC II's in here who are checking stuff out and you can share running configs what's happening here and what's going on great place to communicate with other people alright books that's been a big question is what books am i using to prepare encore I think this goes without saying you have to take the Encore exam in order to get ready for CCIE so as soon as I'm finishing up with my NRC recording I'm going to be focusing on this encore book I already feel pretty good about the content that's on encore I watched a lot of the CBT Nuggets as they were being produced and these topics are quite frankly in my wheelhouse so I do I want to take the encore exam within the next three months all of this stuff does kind of depend on how quarantine shakes out where I am we got hit pretty hard by coronavirus so quarantine I'm expecting our homes quarantine to go into July but that shouldn't stop me from being able to read as soon as my my kiddos go down for bed I tend to do some pretty hefty reading and some laughing so encore is up first next is the NRC textbook I already read a lot of this textbook and I think it's pretty interesting I feel like this textbook goes beyond what the exam topics list and quite frankly that falls right in line with how I'm recording my CBT Nuggets too for instance if I jump over to the exam topics for an RC like right here under BGP you can see it says route reflectors excluding multiple route reflectors confederations dynamic clear I'm recording about multiple route reflectors and Confederations there's not much extra to them they are real-world scenarios quite frankly I think they're pretty cool so if you go through the CBT Nuggets content or if you're reading this textbook to support the CBT Nuggets content or they kind of complement each other you'll find out pretty quickly that these things do go a little bit beyond what the exam calls for but really that just makes you a more well-rounded network engineer and more prepared for the exam so an RCT textbook really like this textbook I made a post on Twitter earlier this week I think this exam out of all the CCNP exams is the most intimidating unless you've just spent a long time studying routing and switching and services but I feel like this will probably be one of the more difficult exams that that I tackle in this progress all right next textbook sd-1 this this book comes out in August super excited to get my hands on this that also falls right around the timeline that I'm hoping to start recording the e NS DW of the the SCO an exam course for CBT Nuggets a couple other trainers have expressed interest in recording that with me so I'm excited about that but yeah this this textbook you know there's a lot of new Software Defined Networking on the CCIE blueprint so I think this book is going to be critical for success there along with software to find access and a few places I posted that this is the topic that I'm most stressed about and that's that's the absolute truth I am most stressed about software to find access and DNA Center because it's very hard to get your hands on DNA Center and software to find access unless you're already in an enterprise that has it and they're going to allow you to jack up your environment while you learn that this is the thing that I'm most concerned about there is the definite sandbox and were going to talk about the definite sandbox in just a moment so I'll save that next up we've got the design textbook now when earlier this week when I set out on my journey I was kind of like yeah a design is cool I'll read this book it'll probably help you know I mean I won't even take the test not the case anymore after sitting in the webinar and learning about the new CCIE format the first module of the exam is strictly designed so previously there were there were two modules you had you know maybe design and deploy and then there was trouble shoot and you had to pass both well now it's design is its own module and then there's deploy operate optimize is the second module and you have to pass both these so this to me is CCIE the people who developed the CCI saying we are putting a real emphasis on just design you need to be able to design a good network so I am going to read this book thoroughly and definitely sit the exam for that I'd also love to record the content for CBT Nuggets for that example to tcp/ip Volume one second edition ton of people recommended this book so bought it I bought all these books Cisco press made a lot of money off of me in the past couple weeks so yep there's this one and then of course volume two got that one too I think both of those books come in to me this weekend and then the last textbook here is the internet routing architecture this is just a book on basically BGP so it's gonna help fill in a lot of those bgp gaps if there are any after reading in RC the NRC textbook is pretty thorough though I feel pretty good after reading the BGP content so these are books and we've got books and immunity laid out here people that I can talk to books that I can read how am i taking notes when I read these books good old-fashioned highlighter I don't have a digital app I'm not using like OneNote or an iPad Pro or anything like that I just just how I am I don't like reading from Kindle I don't like reading from screens my eyes aren't what they used to be so I I buy the books I take notes I highlight as I go along now to the actual tools and the labs themselves first up is the definite sandbox this is free it's definite sandbox cisco.com login with your github account because I know you've all followed the definite content and got a github account so you could practice the git repositories and things like that DNA Center again this is the one where I was like okay how are we gonna do this there are reservable DNA Center environments right here the always on DNA Center environments are read-only you can click around in them but you can't actually deploy anything can actually change anything so the always-on sandboxes are great to get familiar with them not so great when you actually want to practice things that are probably gonna be on the exam environment my stress levels are elevated because the DNA Center all the reservable sandboxes are like chronically reserved like once someone reserves them you can't really what happened to my pin this keeps happening to me you can see it says this contains a resource that is currently unavailable so if you go to reserve the DNA sandbox cuz it'll tell you when it's next available and in my experience they've always been reserved for like weeks in advance you can only reserve it like 3 a.m. or something like that so that makes it a little more challenging also here is the SD LAN sandboxes and I believe they are creating a new SD Wan sandbox I think it's coming out soon there's an always-on version of it and then the reservable one again that you can change and hack up through the definite course and the in Auto course I have illegal aimed on this all of this reservable sandbox so that we could show you how you can automate specific tasks with post requests put requests and so on so you know again cisco thank you for providing this to us beyond that there's like Cisco IOS XE there's NSO there's a lot of things that you can get familiar with here what it comes to prepping for your stuff this is free to use it spins up an actual environment that you can use I think that's just really incredible and just about every platform is covered over here on the right-hand side you see the data center collaboration and security and so on so really really cool that that is there again the thing that I'm most worried about is DNA Center and that's why I'm excited about next week's webinar when they talk about how you prepare for the exam what's what's the prep like and I want to ask them like what do you recommend for people with SD access in DNA Center who can't get their hands on that so I'm interesting now of course even G I just absolutely I'm obsessed with this tool right now I absolutely love it it can if you have the correct licensing and you are entitled to the queue cow images the basically the images of the Cisco device this thing can run it so if there's like fire power sd when C you see em like I've seen other people posting their topologies where they run all of these platforms in a virtualized environment and they can now work with these devices so I'm using this too right now because I'm highly focused on BGP and some other things like MPLS layer 3 VPN like my hello world topology here I can open this up this is how I'm focused on you know lapping this stuff up right now so you know just to kind of show you what I did here this little land internet section this is how I actually bridge all of these devices out to my network you can right-click on the topology add a network and then choose you know which networks you want to use so I chose the management network here and that's how I get it out to my physical network so this computer can SSH into these devices or better run the ansible playbooks these red connections here are how these are the out of band management so that I can access these devices over SSH following tips from IP v 0 I created a v RF on each one of these devices so when I'm actually laughing and I'm looking at the routing tables the out-of-band management isn't there also the networks aren't shared through interior gateway interior gateway protocols like OSPF and EIGRP so that's really cool and everyday let me bring up vs code for a second when I start this lab up I don't want to go through the same steps of typing the interface name the IP address then enabling OSPF I want to build a base topology and that is where my ansible playbooks come into play so on my github where there's code samples so you can see I've got lab 1 lab to lab 3 we're looking at lab 1 right now this is lab 1 and I built a you know playbook here the SS ages into each one of these devices so it's their loopback addresses so it's their interface IP addresses and then enables OSPF on these specific interfaces that I cared about the actual interface IPS are all in host VARs here and the connection credentials are all in group bars here so I fire up windows subsystem for Linux by just typing WSL it's all going on behind me and then I navigate to my ansible playbook I run my playbook and it stands up my lab topology so from here everything has the addresses and I can dig into practicing BGP and MPLS layer 3 VPN yeah can't speak highly enough about even G this tool is amazing it was not terribly hard to set up I am running this on an ESXi server Adel our 7/10 bought it off eBay for a few nerves and I installed it using an ISO I couldn't use the ova template because my version of es6 i was too low but i did install with an ISO took a few minutes and then I was up and running with even G so fantastic resources there um yeah I think I think that just about covers all of the ways that I'm preparing my strategy as of right now is still take the Encore exam and then dig into the concentration exams these electives that I like to call them because I feel like they go into the topics deeper almost to a CCIE level some of them are a little shy of the CCIE level like for instance on in nursing there's under VPN technologies there's describe MPLS layer 3 VPN whereas when you actually look at the CCI a blooper it is implement MPLS layer 3 VPN but at least at this point you know I'll have a good familiarity with it I feel like the NRC textbook covers this very well and Keith Barker when he recorded his nuggets on MPLS layer 3 VPN you implement MPLS layer 3 VPN there's a virtual lab to accompany it too which is really cool so yeah those are the tools that I'm using that's the progress I've made this week let me jump over to chat and see well there's a lot of chat that went on here let's see somebody just passed encore a few weeks back congratulations to you that's awesome starting the NRC path I think that's really cool why not sign up for Riley Oh online so again that goes back to I I really hate reading digital books that's just a personal preference it's bad on my eyes I don't like looking at a little screen or even a kid or like an iPad so I think I just I gotta have the physical book flipping pages and highlighting pages it's I guess I'm just old-school like that but that's how I learn it's softer on my eyes it's better on my brain so there's that preparing for encore got CBT Nuggets the Cisco press book just trying to figure out the best path aren't we all right we are all in it together man I think that's really cool got to tell you I really love Donato I love that exam I love studying for it I loved recording it don't overlook that because it also counts towards your dev net professional so you know you get your encore you're in Auto then you've only got dev core to go to get a definite professional so that's pretty cool too let's see how you prepared for encore we've got I think it would be super cool if you could record videos for the lab part for sd1 DNA absolutely planning on recording the sd1 course for CBT Nuggets if they'll let me I have also inquired about recording the SD access content - gonna be tricky to see how we do it probably a lot of definite sandbox Rd cloud in that environment where we're demoing a DNA Center maybe I can get my hands on some actual hardware to demo it but it's a bridge we can cross when we get to that point but yeah a couple people have reached out already and said the Software Defined Networking is their big stressor when preparing for CCIE and they would love to see content recorded on that I can tell you that it's on the way then I'm probably gonna finish the anar C recording next week or the week after hopefully I'll be done with it next week I have some commitments to Azure content I'm gonna review recording some AZ 204 and some AZ 304 content as well as I would like to tackle the da 100 that's the new power bi course that sets up for a late summer early fall start for SD when recording and then you know I can tell you I'm the type of guy who like I blitz this recording I try to get it done as quick as I can so it can get into your your hands as quickly as possible so when I sit down to record SD win I'm gonna be banging it out so that's gonna be awesome del Sur respects it is a del R 710 it has two six core processors so 24 threads and 64 gigs of ram if you're if you're poking around on ebay you can find a comparable del r 720 now so newer processors you could probably scoop that up for 350 400 bucks without storage my recommendations to you there is when you buy a dell are 720 get to get one with at least 12 cores so two six core processors get one with at least 64 gigs of ram and get one that has three and a half inch drive bays a lot of these servers come with just two and a half inch drive bays for these SAS disks i highly recommend getting one with three and a half inch drive bays if you have SSDs like two and a half inch drives you can buy an adapter they have like a little adapter that goes in the three and a half inch drive bay that just shrinks it down to two and a half inch so it works great and then you've got the ability to do both three-and-a-half inch and two and a half inch disks so you could do like two SSDs and RAID one that way you've got some fast storage and then you can do like two three and a half inch drives you know four terabytes and RAID one as well and then well you've got some you know spinning discs with heavy storage too so I think that's pretty cool yeah let's see multicasts included in encore that is a great question I don't that if there was multicast in encore it was more like just know about it I don't think there was any implement where as an RC there was multicast and Keith Parker recorded that as well I don't recall seeing let's take a look real quick I've got the exam blueprint here in front of me um let's take a look yeah ARP layer two layer three IP service scissors describe multicast protocols so it's described that's to know about them it's not an implement or configure so you would want to know about them and it's recommended like why not just watch the anar see Nuggets even if you're not planning on taking the test if you just watched the Nuggets you're now just a step more well-versed in these topics so that's always kind of been my strategy is just take it a step a little bit further that way when you roll into the exam you're like oh yeah I know this I'd actually know how to do beyond that so that's my thoughts on preparation there any more questions before we wrap up today yeah I mean I really can't wait for next week next week is gonna be a big week for me because I'm gonna try and wrap up in Narsee recording on the bgp content as well as troubleshooting with DNA Center assurance so yeah how hard is the exam comparing old versus the new exam pattern well so are you talking about CCIE or ccnp that's the real question I've heard very mixed things I've heard the encore exam is you know challenging and thorough but you'll find more challenging exams with like NRC I am when I take it I'll let you know as far as the CCIE exam I'm sure the CCIE exam is a CCI exam I'm sure it's very challenging the environment itself has changed though giving you two monitors and multiple tabs that you can work with on consoles to I think support you and help you out a little bit better maybe it'll make it less of a time crunch exam and more of a like how much do you know exam so um again once I take all these exams I will record nugget I will record videos or go live and just let you know my impressions of the exam when I passed dev ask dev core and in OTO I went live on those and without you know violating the NDA on those I told you exactly my thoughts about the exams when it came to challenges things like the Deaf core exam really caught me off guard because it's a two-hour exam 102 questions one hour into it I was on like question 30 so it's like wow this is a time crunch exam my strategy has to change right now so yeah if you're interested in dev ask Debbie Coronado go watch those live streams that I did where I talked about my thoughts on how those exam environments really work um cool so I'm gonna wrap up there this was a great live stream again I cannot thank you all enough for your support for reaching out and motivating me inspiring me I'm gonna do this I'm gonna get there yeah I I can't wait I really can't wait I'm so excited cool that's well wrap up I'm gonna go record some bgp Nuggets right now for CBT Nuggets y'all have a good one stay safe thanks for stopping by I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Data Knox

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Keywords: ccie routing and switching, cisco ccie, cbt nuggets, cisco certification, ccie certification, ccie lab builder, ccie routing & switching, ccie routing and switching lab, ccie enterprise lab, ccie enterprise, ccie enterprise infrastructure, ccie enterprise infrastructure v1.0, ccie enterprise infrastructure lab, ccie enterprise infrastructure training, ccie enterprise infrastructure lab exam, ccie enterprise wireless equipment list, ccie enterprise core encor 350-401

Id: HVh78S9nzlw

Length: 23min 45sec (1425 seconds)

Published: Fri May 22 2020