Certification Goals for 2016... What Are Yours?

[burnyd]

VCXN610 passed!!!!!!

I have seriously no idea how that happened. I walked out thinking I failed, and ended up with 382/500 (300 is the passing score... haha vmware is so loose).

Its an absolutely brutal exam with the slowest, most crash prone environment in the world, complete with questions so vague it makes the CCIE lab exam look like webster's dictionary. Burnyd will know the score. Its also even more time pressure than the CCIE due to the super slow GUI


I swear 2 out of the 18 questions I didn't even end up doing as they literally bugged out on me (e.g. I had a distributed logical router to fix, the GUI literally wouldn't let me edit the interfaces, the mouse icon was swapping between arrow and edit hundreds of times a second. So I deleted it and redeployed it, and NSX just kept tearing it down unable to establish a control plane, WTF).


Whatever marking script they use is insane as I had the result within 30 minutes of walking out. I wonder how much the marking script got wrong, coz I am still amazed at how I got that score


Next target: CCDE written (for recert lulz). Still undecided whether I want to follow through - the heavy carrier content is interesting but irrelevant to my job and large swathes of it is being rapidly obsoleted by SD-(insert buzzword). I have a feeling the current syllabus will go EOL in the next 12 months.

Congrats!  Haha yah that test was bs it was so slow.  I took that test when it first came out and the test actually failed twice on me ie the test engine broke lol.  So I took it all in all 3x.

Go for the DE written or sounds like you are doing SP stuff... if you have the XR experience just go for SP.

[wintermute000]

nah I'm not doing SP stuff (although I AM reading a fantastic book right now - MPLS in the SDN era - by God its amazing) that's the problem, and I'll probably never touch IOS-XR outside of a lab, so its hard to get real life XP or mileage out of the SP track, even though at an intellectual level I really like MPLS (segment routing / PCEP / BGP-LS is mind blowing).

Its the same conundrum with going deeper in to the server side e.g. VCAP6-DCV Design + Deploy or RHCSA --> RHCE, though those two are probably more directly applicable in my line of work. Its just irritating as I'm starting to get stretched real thin and I'm not sure if I'll retain anything I don't get to drive in production (which is already happening with some certs I did a year or two ago...)

If this was 2012 I'd probably unhesitatingly go deeper into the Vmware hosting side of things but in the current landscape its so hard to pick a horse isn't it!

[icecream-guy]

TSHOOT Booked  9/30/16

goood for another 3 years 

15% inconsistent
25% easy
75% hard which includes the 15% inconsistencies

stupid crap like "show ip protocols" shows no protocol redistribution
"show run"   in the routing protocols section, under the routing protocol "redistribute....."

other odds and ends that didn't add up right.

wasn't as I expected from reviewing the TSHOOT exam demo.

oh, and I think I clicked through one of the trouble tickets,  exam was running slow, and took a few seconds to load trouble tickets.
I think I clicked next before the ticket loaded, thinking it would reload, but it didn't.

pass is a pass.

[deanwebb]

And yes, passing score is passing.

It's disappointing when the review doesn't point towards the test. That's the whole point of the review... sheesh... I get to do my ForeScout Certified Associate in two weeks after I do the class.

Then I add it to my LinkedIn profile and kick off another wave of recruiter InMails...

[icecream-guy]

yeah, now that i got that load off my shoulders, planning to update my linked in profile this weekend, start looking for that next project.

Did you put that CISSP on the back burner?  I'm thinking of going that route next. or maybe doing some python learning.

[SimonV]

Congrats, Ristau! I sent you a PM earlier about the TSHOOT, think I'll go that route to renew my NP instead of doing ROUTE all over

[deanwebb]

yeah, now that i got that load off my shoulders, planning to update my linked in profile this weekend, start looking for that next project.

Did you put that CISSP on the back burner?  I'm thinking of going that route next. or maybe doing some python learning.

More like on the piano bench by my home office chair, but... yeeeeeeaaaaaahhh... I blame the insanity with RADIUS I had to go through in May/June. On the other hand, I presented at BSidesLV, so I count that as a feather in my cap and a career goal attained.

[icecream-guy]

Congrats, Ristau! I sent you a PM earlier about the TSHOOT, think I'll go that route to renew my NP instead of doing ROUTE all over

good route to go, probably the easiest Cisco test.

[SimonV]

Bought the hardware for TSHOOT topology, then decided it would be too much physical hassle and built it in GNS3. Switching still buggy as hell but other than that I have the full topology working. I'll spend a few more days familiarizing myself and then go for it.

[deanwebb]

I keep thinking 2017 is the year of the CISSP for me...

[icecream-guy]

Bought the hardware for TSHOOT topology, then decided it would be too much physical hassle and built it in GNS3. Switching still buggy as hell but other than that I have the full topology working. I'll spend a few more days familiarizing myself and then go for it.

for me it was the other way around, GNS3 kept crashing or loosing configs, etc,  frustrating, I used physical lab gear.

[SimonV]

I'm running the images on a dedicated GNS3 VM with 12 gigs of RAM on my ESXi . I don't have serial interfaces on my 1841s so GSN3 was easier to get the frame-relay going. I could probably bridge out to physical 3560s and make it a hybrid solution. Lost 30 minutes because of a faulty mac-address-table last night.

[icecream-guy]

I didn't even worry about the frame relay. I just did serial links between the routers. worked out just fine.

[SimonV]

Passed TSHOOT this morning, was fun 

[Ironman]

 

Congrats! I agree, it is a "fun" exam.