Hi Everyone,

I know it took some time, but here we go: new full-scale Routing and Switching and Security labs are now being delivered to your members account. Two new labs have been posted under both IEWB-RS VOL2 v5.0 (updated Labs 1 and 2) and IEWB-SC VOL2 v5.0 (updated Labs 6 and 7) member areas.

The new Routing and Switching labs now fully reflect the upcoming changes in CCIE R&S lab exam. Specifically, every lab will now feature MPLS VPN section and new technologies added in IOS 12.4T such as Zone-Based Firewall, Control-Plane Protection and many others. Not only this, the whole full-scale lab paradigm have been shifted. You are no longer required to do a lot of basic configurations, such as creating VLAN, initializing IGPs, setting up BGP peerings and so on. Instead, you will find many settings such as switchport to VLAN assignment and basic IGP configuration already done for you. The full-scale scenarios now require you enhancing or tuning the existing configurations and are even more challenging than they was before. As many people would agree, discovering and working with the existing configuration is much harder than creating your own from scratch!

The total lab point value for R&S labs has been reduced to 79 points with a passing score of 64. This reflects the current situation in the CCIE testing, where Core Knowledge Section has taken 21 points away from the 100-point exam. As you may know, with the addition of the Troubleshooting section the total amount of point could become even less, probably as low as 54 points! However, we still decided to keep the point values of our full-scale labs higher, to provide you with more challenging scenarios than you could expect in the real exam.

Next, we plan releasing more full-scale labs for R&S track gradually every week. The full update of IEWB-RS VOL2 labs should to be completed by the 3rd week of September, as well as delivery of the new VOL1 sections, covering MPLS VPNs and 12.4T features. Oh, and did I mention that another two labs for IEWB-RS VOL4 (Advanced Troubleshooting) are on their way to being posted? :)

And lastly, some really good news for our CCIE Security students. In addition to the two labs that have been posted already, we plan releasing the remaining three labs next week and complete the update of our IEWB-SC VOL2 workbook. After this, you will see more updates coming to the IEWB-SC VOL1 technology focused scenarios.

Thanks for choosing INE and happy studying!