straw poll: whats next

[wintermute000]

OK I'm trying to decide what to do next, what do you all think?


CCNP-DC
Pros: I need to show my Nexus stripes, and doing a ton of Nexus work (why do I get all the 1st gen SUP-1 7k customers???)
Cons: Having to learn UCS which I'll never touch IRL, 7k/5k going out of style anyway (so is UCS with the trend towards scale-out commodity rack servers), syllabus is old, 4 bloody exams


JNCIP-SP
Pros: I love MPLS and JUNOS, one exam
Cons: As a consultant 95% of my work is enterprise networking so I hardly see any pure SP work/topics, the syllabus is also kinda old, and I don't really have the real life XP to match that level of cert / will take a lot of hands on lab pain. Also at that level the Juniper official freebie guides are not applicable so I'm not really sure where to start with studying/how far. Finally it looks a bit old... will North Star / BGP-LS+PCEP take over everything and invalidate knowing MPLS-TE? LOL


JNCIS-SEC
Pros: Comes in kinda useful in a lot of smaller projects / customers with SRX firewalls, I love JUNOS, briliant documentation, one exam
Cons: I don't like security LOL but bloody firewalls are always everywhere and my company prides itself on having multi-skilled consultants, another bloody stream to re-cert as Juniper won't let you 'cross the streams' for renewal purposes


VCIX-NV
Pros: I love NSX
Cons: Again I have no production XP with this so will have to do a lot more labbing, syllabus looks difficult (4 hour lab - half a CCIE?) BUT I've been told verbally that its easy and in no way CCIE level, would my SDN learning time be better devoted to open tools (ansible deployments, general python etc.), niche proprietary product - investing in this is a bet (like studying ACI for example)


The problem appears to boil down to: the directly useful certs I'm not that interested in (and learning UCS will be quite onerous), and the ones I'm actually interested in will take much more work and/or their application to my daily work is uncertain

[deanwebb]

JNCIS-SEC because nobody else likes security, so you'll be the only one with it for miles around. Knock it out of the ballpark and then reward yourself with an exam that you like.

[burnyd]

Trying not to compare my environment but...

vcix-nv opens up a lot of doors and its a VMware cert.  Most people do not have much production experience with nsx so its fine.  When I took the exam it was real life things ie put in this dfw or put in this nat rule build this bgp neighbor etc.  Its not like the ccie where they make it so incredibly unrealistic that you are running pbr to go through a tunnel over 5 nat's.

Second the Juniper stuff.

All the cisco ccnp-dc imho is dead.  Fabric path, OTV, etc I dont see people greenfielding those technologies.  I dont see UCS being greenfieled as well its all about hyperconverged anymore.

[wintermute000]

Thanks for your opinions. I think you guys are right re: decline in CCNP-DC relevance. Its just that right now I seem to be copping all the N7k customers LOL. But yes can't see too many greenfields deployments.


However I'd like to note that something similar is happening with Vmware due to public cloud, maturity of KVM/Hyper-V etc. (check the share price!). But not being a virt guy I can't tell you how much/far or how well vmware is responding. I do hear a lot of people talking about vcloud air/horizon air, it lets the server teams have their cake (keep their iron/relevance) and eat it too ("we got cloud now!").


Looks like the openstack + scale-out arch + commodity servers/storage/networking/hosts movement is over-running every traditional Enterprise IT segment. Though Australian large enterprise is notoriously conservative and 'nobody ever got fired for buying Cisco/Vmware/MS/EMC etc..


VCIX-NV and JNCIS-SEC it is. burnyd, what resources did you use for VCIX-NV aside from official docs/blueprint?


This site looks pretty good as a yardstick. But I would love a lab guide as well.
http://lostdomain.org/vcix-nv-study-guide/


I'm also  bit worried about being out of date - I know NSX 6.2 brings in a lot of changes (central CLI etc.), cross vcenter NSXs and UDLR/ULS.... is there any indication when the current VCIX-NV is going EOL?

[wintermute000]

well that was easy... JNCIS-SEC done. Basically memorising platform/JUNOS specific behaviour/packet flow, especially UTM and clustering - Nat is NAT, IPSEC is IPSEC, once you've driven a few firewalls they all start to look alike LOL.
I'm sure I'll start forgetting it once a few months pass without production time on an SRX, but its good to have that basic knowledge at the back of your mind somewhere.
Tempted to do the ENT to complete the trifecta / we do occasionally run into EX switches, but with so little production JUNOS time, I'm not in any way tempted to pursue the P or E level exams at this stage.


BTW not sure if you guys have seen this. Apparently the new VCIX-NV exam is floating around in beta or will be shortly.


https://blogs.vmware.com/education/2015/12/vcix6-certification-announcement-part-1-of-3.html
https://blogs.vmware.com/education/2015/12/vcix6-certification-announcement-part-2-3-updated-structure-paths.html
https://blogs.vmware.com/education/2015/12/vcix6-certification-announcement-part-3-of-3-exam-guides.html

[SimonV]

Damn, where do you find the time to knock out certs so fast  Congrats!

[deanwebb]

Well done, wintermute!

[wintermute000]

Thanks. Simon, I haven't watched a movie, tv episode or played a real pc game in approx two years slight exaggeration, maybe a movie or two during holidays etc but I basically do not spend any time on home entertainment. Even my graphics card died a year ago and still not replaced... Yes feels dirty running on intel gpu
Though this was an easy cert with another jncis already, and like I said, nat is nat, ipsec is ipsec etc and it's just one exam. Also my passing score was literally just over the line LOL

[deanwebb]

Passing is passing. No need to blow the top out of the score.