Props to my colleague, for sacrificing many nights, insights, white boards, coffee beans, bar napkins and a ridiculous amount of time building that Data Centers together. Completing the written exam I set a goal to pass my CCIE Data Center Written exam at Cisco Live, and did just that in May 2014. I found that watching instructional videos from trusted training providers like INE and IPexpert really helped with understanding the technologies well enough to prepare and pass the written exam.
I took copious notes, many of them hand-written, which others agree aid in helping you retain information more so than just unconsciously typing. I created indexes of the blueprint topics and went through each one in detail. Study Strategy for the Lab exam Create a spreadsheet to track progress Now the real fun begins, preparation for the lab. This was my first time preparing for such an intense exam, so nerd as I am, I created a spreadsheet to help me keep track of everything. I later found some other sheets online that like-minded people had created and made adjustments as necessary to improve my tracking.
I created tabs for my overall schedule, blueprint objectives, INE videos, IPExpert videos, books to read, mock labs, Peter Revill’s blogs, and my personal blog ideas. I’ll attach a cleaned copy to download if you’re interested.
Here is a short screenshot of the blueprint tab: Download here: UPDATE for CCIE DC v2: Learn Cisco.com navigation, read ALL Data Center Configuration Guides I went through each topic in chronological order with great detail. This is where I honed my skills on navigating the Cisco support documentation. Say for example the next topic was “Implementing Netflow” – I would go to cisco.com/go/techdocs and navigate my way to the NetFlow configuration guide for NX-OS and read the entire guide end-to-end taking notes along the way. It can be dry at times, especially UCS, but I feel that this helped me the most with my Data Center studies. Ciscolive.com has an enormous amount of very useful zero-cost training. Full PDFs and videos, an excellent resource for diving deep. Take copious notes For note-taking, I would most often use Evernote or hand writing.