Posts from ‘CCIE Security’
I would like to thank the over 600 people who RSVP’d for INE’s 2013 Party at the Hard Rock Cafe in Orlando during Cisco Live. Registration is closed as of today for our party but I wanted to be the first to let everyone know about the grand prize giveaway we are doing. On top of the standard giveaway prizes (iPads, MacBook Airs, AAP Memberships, Bootcamps, etc) we are giving away a Harley Davidson 2013 XL 1200X Forty-Eight to a lucky winner during our party.
On top of the Harley Davidson 2013 XL 1200X Forty-Eight we’re having a second grand prize giveaway. Details on the second grand prize giveaway will be revealed after the drawing for the winner of the Harley Davidson at the party.
As a side note I don’t personally ride anymore but that bike really does look cool when it’s all blacked out.
Tags: ccie party, Cisco Live Party
Our new CCIE Security Version 4 Technology Labs and Solutions are now available in your members’ site account for customers who owned the previous CCIE Security Volume 1 or 2 workbooks. The labs are in the new HTML format like our Data Center material to ensure you always have the most up to date material along with allowing for advanced features (bookmarking, highlight tasks, etc). The full scale mock labs are in development now and are included with the Security workbook as we are doing away with the volume naming structure (Volume I, II, III, etc) and have gone to a single workbook.
Here is what is available in your members’ site account:
Section 1: System Hardening and Availability
Tags: ccie scv4, CCIE Security, security workbook
The top contributors in May for the following forums will receive their choice of either an iPad or Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet. The top overall contributor for IEOC for May will receive their choice of an Apple Macbook Air (13″ 256GB) or Google Pixel with 4G LTE.
CCIE Routing & Switching Technical
CCIE Service Provider Technical
Additionally the best CCIE success story (most details, inspirational, etc) post on IEOC in May will also receive their choice of either an iPad or Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet.
Good Luck!
Just a couple slides to show everyone from Cisco’s OpenFlow presentation that looks interesting for just about everyone reading this post.
The CSR1000v is here now. IOS XR4U (XR VR) has been around for a while. Is vIOS IOU? How about vNXOS, is it Titanium or something new? Seems that vIOS will be IOU and vNXOS is Titanium.
From what I’m hearing this is being delivered as an “appliance”. A web interface is used to deploy topologies simular to GNS3 and web IOU. The future looks bright!
Tags: ccie lab, cisco virl
Here is our updated and simplified CCIE bootcamp reseat policy:
Bootcamp Retake Policy
INE invites all students to retake a Bootcamp course for only a $500-per-week rack rental fee. Routing & Switching Bootcamps are excluded from the fee and are free of charge. How do you know whether seats are available for a Bootcamp retake? It’s simple! As long as the Bootcamp is not labeled “Sold Out” on our website, you can retake it. Unlike other training companies, we do not limit the number of seats for students retaking a course.
It really doesn’t get any better and simpler than this. For the non-R&S CCIE bootcamps if you calculate the reseat fee out the $500 is cheaper than you renting the rack yourself for a week especially for our Service Provider bootcamps and new Data Center Bootcamps.
Tags: ccie, ccie bootcamp
Once you have ESXi 5.1 up and running download the CSR1000v OVA (Open Virtualization Archive) file here. Note that you will need to use your Cisco CCO login to download. Once the download is complete you need to open your vSphere Client and connect to your ESXi server. Once connected select the Deploy OVF Template option from the file menu.
Select the source of the OVA file you downloaded from your local machine.
I’ve had a major enhancement added to the rack rentals that many people have wanted for a long time. Starting late next week we will move away from the standard start times and fixed session lengths for the rack rentals and allow sessions to be started anytime and run for any length of time. There will be a minimum of a one hour session length but other than that there are no restrictions.
This means for example if you want to start a session at 9:30am (your local time) and run for 4 hours you can do that. If you want a session to start at 5:00pm (your local time) and go for 7 hours you can. Also the longer your session is the cheaper it will be. We will even allow for sessions running days or weeks at a time which will really drop the price.
The first phase of this enhancement is already in place. This first phase allows you to start your session anytime. You do not need to wait for the next slot to start. The remaining time in the current slot will be prorated and you can either just use the remaining time for your rental or add it to the following session for a longer rental.
Below is a session I rented showing that the session was prorated down to 9 tokens from 12 to account for only having a little over 2 hours left on the session when I scheduled it.
The second phase which will become active next week will totally remove the concept of fixed start times and session lengths by allowing you to determine your own start time and session length days, weeks or even months ahead of time.
Also just to steal Brian McGahan’s thunder for his blog post tomorrow the DC workbooks and racks will be available Monday or Tuesday 
I know that we live in a globalized world, full of virtual friends linked via social sites – and honestly that is great. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting so many people all over the world now that our world is indeed so much ‘smaller’ because of technology. I love it. I do. However, when I actually get to really meet those people, in person, face to face, I can’t help but feel something of a bit more connected to them. Shaking someone’s hand, actually seeing their face, still means something I think. I think this is why all of us in the networking community really enjoy coming together annually at Cisco Live – Networkers. We get to put faces with names, and see old faces that we have connected with in years past.
It’s one of the reasons I still very much like teaching live classes, and I believe why students still like attending them. You not only get a captive audience with the student/instructor for a solid two weeks, but you also get to see and hear and talk to someone in person. You get to hear their story. What makes them … them. What drives them. You get to actually know them. I also think that meeting in person is something intentional, and that if you had the inkling of maybe putting off your studies for a night after work, that if you were a part of a study group that actually met in person, you’d be less likely to cancel – maybe feel a bit more committed or obligated to show up.
So to that end, I would like to find out if there is anyone living in the Los Angeles / Orange County / San Diego area that would be interested in a CCIE study group one night per week. I propose Mondays, but I am open to any night Monday-Thursday, really. This would be a group where anyone studying for their CCIE in any track could come together and study for a few hours each week. Obviously, we’d break apart and each study in our own sub-groups dedicated to the track we are trying to attain. When we first meetup, we would devise an agenda for the coming months, and focus on those topics when we meet each week. And as is usual, the stronger in a given topic domain help out the weaker, and we all grow. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, and we all have something to gain from each other.
I would like to find out who all might be interested in meeting in this area, and actually in any area for that matter. While I can’t host the group in every city, I’d still be interested if there are more than just one person studying for a given cert in each city. I would venture to guess that there are. 
For the LA/OC area, I would be more than happy to host, and provide all the coffee and a snacks each week. As I said above, we could have multiple people come together even if studying for different tracks. I would be quite happy to participate in the Data Center, Voice and Security groups primarily. Respond either in the comments below or by known unicasting me some email if you are interested, or even if you would be interested in hosting a group in another city.
Tags: ccie, study group
Between now and the end of the week we will be releasing our January to June 2013 schedule. You will see a lot of new classes/bootcamps added covering a wide range of topics. These include CCNA Data Center, CCNP Data Center, CCNP Wireless, CCNA Service Provider, CCNP Service Provider, Nexus 1000v & Open vSwitch, UCS & OpenStack, Nexus Live Online Bootcamps, Nexus Live Onsite Bootcamps, etc. You will also notice we are adding new 2 day online courses covering a wide range of topics (ISE, WSE, IOS XR, IOS XE, OpenFlow, etc).
The biggest change that you will notice for 2013 is that for ALL of our new products we will offer hands-on labs and equipment rentals. We’ve made a big push for new hardware in 2012 and we’ll be making an even bigger push for 2013. During the first week of January you will see the new CCNP and CCIE Security racks along with the new CCIE Data Center racks coming online. Additionally our new CCNP Security course will have hands-on labs available around the same time frame.
In 2013 we will be making all of our CCNA courses available free of charge like how our CCNA and CCNA Voice courses are now. Not only will they be free to stream online, we will offer hands-on labs and equipment access for all tracks (CCNA Service Provider, CCNA Data Center tracks, etc). Some of the equipment will be offered free of charge for AAP members and some equipment even free of charge to the general public. The key to learning at this level isn’t to be bored to death with some “professional presenter” going over hours and hours of PowerPoint slides or some low budget video production with a “professional presenter” dancing around the screen. You need to be engaged by watching a real instructor cover the topics hands-on while you also following along on the equipment. Lastly in regards to the CCNA, you will see the current courses redone to allow for this new format.
For the workbooks will be retiring the workbook volume structure (Vol 1, Vol 2, etc) that we first introduced years ago and is now copied by nearly every vendor. We will be moving to a new format that is a single solution laid out in a structured manner as opposed to a portfolio of products. This new format allows for quicker updates and additions to the products along with many other benefits. The new CCIE Security and CCIE Data Center products will be the first to be offered in our new format.
Lastly I will be making a separate post later this month in regarding a new series of online classes that I personally will be doing next year.
The CCIE Data Center exam is finally upon us, and it looks like we’re getting more testing dates than we were originally told to expect. Each of the 4 sites that currently tests the CCIE Storage (San Jose, Brussels, Sydney and Tokyo) each get one day per week to test the DC lab on. So on average, there should be about 4 DC seats per site per month, or roughly 16 seats available worldwide per month. Then, beginning in February, RTP gets the Wednesday slot, and since they are only open 2-3 Wednesdays per month (a strange but common day off there I suppose), we will see roughly 2-3 spots added for the DC lab beginning then. Finally, the very rough timeframe to ramp up on testing racks, and therefore add additional CCIE DC seats, is set to takeoff sometime around July according to sources.
Also, for anyone wanting to get a last minute testing date in even this week, the RTP site just went live a few hours ago with additional seats for this Saturday and Sunday (Dec 15-16). Jump online to book those seats, as they’ll go quickly. Routing and Switching, Voice, Security and Service Provider are all open this weekend.
Tags: CCIE Testing Center, rtp
