Cisco Service Provider Track???

[wintermute000]

FWIW I've decided to pursue the CCIE SP in the background. With the way SDN is going in the carrier space (BGP-LS into PCEP for automated/smart traffic engineering), the syllabus remains entirely relevant moving forwards in my opinion.

In an ideal world I would probably have preferred to go down the Juniper path but the prod XP, plus the ease of labbing in VIRL, plus the quality workbooks/material out there etc. meant that the Cisco path was a lot more feasible. FYR that1guy, your big bad server can run the entire INE topology - its 10 CSRs and 4 IOS-XRvs. I'm running that now in VIRL on a 48Gb / 8 core VM.

My logic is that even if I don't follow through I might as well use the written to recert my R&S anyway, I'm not one for re-doing exams I've done before, esp re-memorising trivial pursuit: cisco edition (aka the CCIE RS written, possibly the WORST exam in history). And I just really enjoy studying/labbing MPLS/MP-BGP in general.