As well as updating the CCIE Data Center track, Cisco have recently updated all CCIE Written exams. A new section called “Evolving Technologies” has been added and accounts for 10% of all CCIE Written exams. The remaining 90% of the exam is made up from the core topics that are relevant to the specific track you are taking. The go-live date is July 2016.
The idea behind the update is to “enable candidates to bridge their core technology expertise with knowledge of the evolving technologies that organizations are adopting at an accelerated pace, such as cloud, IoT, and network programmability.”
Spend 10 minutes of your life learning about the 403 Forbidden response. The good people who are studying for CCIE Collaboration will most likely have run into this time and time again- enjoy!
This video covers how to use RTMT to grab SIP Traces and how to format the text-based answers that are required as part of the Troubleshooting Tasks within the CCIE Collaboration Lab Exam.
This video covers some of the typical tasks that you could be asked to perform in the CCIE Collaboration Lab Exam. Note- the jabber for windows version used in the lab is quite old – 9.2(3). But this is the version you will find in the exam and so you must be familiar it!
The following topics are covered: Deskphone control, Softphone, Voicemail, Video calls, UDS contact resolution, Phone Presence, BFCP
The blue print that can be found on the Cisco website here reveals that the exam is divided up into 7 sections. I would consider Sections 1-3 as being the foundational core of the test. In sections 4-7 we build upon the foundations we set up in the first three sections. It’s also worth pointing out that sections 1-3 comprise 70% of the exam. In this article the lab exam is broken down into 5 distinct p
Phase 1: Campus Infrastructure (30 mins)
In addition to a 30 minute lunch break, there are 8 hours of time allocated for each candidate to complete the assigned tasks. The cost to sit the exam is $1600 (not including taxes that need to be paid in some testing centers). That equates to $3.33 per minute. For every minute you waste being idle, that is over $3 down the drain. Unless you like throwing money away then try and maximize productivity especially at the beginning of the day. This will have a big bearing on how well you are going to score.
The CCIE Collaboration Written should not be under-estimated as it is a very tricky exam (if one avoids the easy options that are available having performed a quick google search). One of the challenges is that very few, if any, companies offer a quality training for this particular test.
Cisco have provided information about the exam topics here.
The suggested training material can be found here.
Having taken a quick look at the suggested training material you should realize that it will take you an entire lifetime to go and read/watch everything suggested. No criticism intended but the list is somewhat exhaustive and it would be very difficult to read the thousands of pages suggested and be able to digest everything. In this article I have tried to provide a little more focus on where candidates should channel their energy. By no means is this a comprehensive list of the entire blueprint but I think somebody with experience with Cisco Collaboration technologies will find the information here will complement their existing knowledge and help prepare for the Written exam.
In this example we want to apply a policer to each individual phone at a branch office so that each phone can only produce enough bandwidth for 1 g711/g722 audio call. Non-conforming voice traffic (RTP packets above the 93Kbps used for that single g711/g722 audio call) will be dropped. The idea here is there must be something sinister going on if a phone is producing more than 1 calls worth of traffic and we want to protect our network by dropping this sinister traffic at the source. The other requirements are that video traffic from each individual phone is policed to 1Mbps and signaling is policed to 24kbps. In both of these cases we won’t drop the non-conforming traffic but instead mark down the layer 3 DSCP Per Hop Behavior to a lower priority (CS1 or DSCP 8).
If you have a CCIE Voice certification and have not converted to CCIE Collaboration- well you have a year to figure it out because on Fed 13 2016 your time is up.
As a reminder you have 3 options:
(1) Pass the CCIE Collaboration Lab exam. You will then hold 2 separate CCIE certifications (Voice and Collab) plus any others you have.
(2) Pass the CCIE Collaboration Written exam and then permanently convert your CCIE Voice to CCIE Collab by raising a support case here: https://ciscocert.force.com/english
(3) Keep your CCIE Voice as it is and hope that this Collaboration thing doesn’t take off.
I know there are lots of folks in the first category- better get moving!
We are pleased to announce that we have added a two week bootcamp in London to our 2015 calendar. The class will be held in City of London (Financial District).
You can either sign up for either the ILT which runs from March 23-27 2015, the Workshop which runs from March 30-Apr 3 2015 or the combo by doing both weeks of class.
I am have spent the past few days in London finalizing our London venue having been eager to avoid hosting the class inside a hotel. It is also very exciting from a personal point of view having lived in London for such a large part of my life.
The question of how much bandwidth does a call consume is something that has occupied the minds of many “collaboration” engineers over the years and specifically is something that you should be aware of if you plan on sitting the CCIE Collaboration lab exam. I’m going to tell you how to do it without referencing any resources.
To set the scene, I want to police Voice/RTP traffic from a phone in my Headquarters office. We shall call this HQ Phone 2.
The policer will be applied on the switchport of HQ Phone 2 (ingress). I am using a 3560X switch.
The details of the policer are as follows: we will assume that conforming packets are all RTP packets for 1 g722 call. Any traffic above and beyond what is needed by 1 call is going to be non-conforming and is subject to an “exceed” action within the policer. The conforming action of the policer is to set the DSCP to the PHB of Expedited Forwarding (EF) and transmit. The exceed action of the policer is to drop packets.
