My CCIE lab

My practice lab for the CCIE was made up of 3 x 3750, 1 3550 switches, 2 x 2821 routers , 2 x 2811 (one acted as a console - from the image thats the one with the green cables, 1 x 2851 router and three lower end routers to inject backbone routes. Just in case shit hit the fan, I had (still have) more than 1000 rack hours over at graded labs.

For the troubleshooting scenarios, I got extremely lucky. Happened to have a Sun Fire X4470 Server, 128GB of memory and some extremely fast processors that allowed me to load well over 30 routers. Virtualizing would have got me more capacity. Dynamips and Dynagen took care of the rest. I didn't even have to meddle with the idlepc. So obviously I had more than enough equipment to get this done.

*Being ready and having access to the right equipment and people clearly came out as one of the key factors if you expect to pass the ccie. Out of the 15 or so guys that sat the mobile lab, I think only my colleague and I passed which to me is very telling.

*I have never paid Narbik a single cent but for some reason he answered all my questions promptly - ON CHAT!....including after the lab when I had trouble accessing information on how to become a ccsi. So thanks for that...

I had (still have about 1500hrs rented rack over at INE) and the lab above was set up for the full INE R&S topology. I also have to add that INE/graded lab racks are probably more advanced than any other commercial rack I ever tried (and I tried quite a number). My time zone (+3 GMT) allowed me to get excellent service/rack hours.

Considering all the above, the only thing stopping me from taking the CCIE SP is the change in blueprint.

To the physical devices above will be added some IOS-XR devices and I expect that to form the basis for future blogs if I'm not too lazy to post that here. I am yet to decide on a vendor vs self study for workbooks and how much 'noteput' to produce (I could do my own workbooks). IOS-XR is not very well covered, there's not many examples for various scenarios, neither is the CRS-1/ASR's and other high end devices that I might have access to....I would expect that to add value here in between my rambling...we'll see
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