01 Cisco CCIE Routing - Switching V4 Experience

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Table of Contents
CCIE Routing & Switching
 Unit 1: Preparation
Cisco CCIE Routing & Switching V4 Experience
Where to start for CCIE Routing & Switching
Cisco CCIE R&S Book Reading List
How to use the “Doc CD”
Useful links on the Doc CD
Lab Equipment
 Unit 2: Switching
 Unit 3: IP Routing
 Unit 4: RIP
 Unit 5: EIGRP
 Unit 6: OSPF
 Unit 7: BGP
 Unit 8: Multicast
 Unit 9: IPv6
 Unit 10: Quality of Service
 Unit 11: Security
1 of 16 08/16/2017 03:30 AM
 Unit 12: System Management
 Unit 13: Network Services
 Unit 14: MPLS
You are here: Home » Cisco » CCIE Routing & Switching
Cisco CCIE Routing & Switching V4

Experience
a d k y v
Friday the 13th, 5:45am in the

morning…still in bed after a short night
since I’m still excited/anxious yesterday’s
CCIE Routing & Switching lab attempt. I
rub the sleep from my eyes, take my
cellphone and I see a message that says
that my results are published on the Cisco
website.
I jump out of my bed and sprint faster

than Usain Bolt to my laptop in the living
room to view the results. My hands are
shaking as I open my browser and login at
Cisco.com…
I can’t believe what I see…the word “Pass” is staring right at me…CCIE #41726 is gazing
upon me. After countless of hours reading, studying, labbing, frustration and excitement
it has �nally come to an end!
Since you are reading this my guess is that you are also looking to become CCIE certi�ed.
2 of 16 08/16/2017 03:30 AM
I’d like to share with you how it started for me, prepared myself, studied and what the lab
was like.
It starts with a dream…

Back in 2009/2010 I was working as a CCSI
(Cisco Certi�ed System Instructor)
teaching mostly CCNA/CCNP R&S classes.
To feel con�dent in the classroom it is
important to know your stu� since you
don’t want a situation where the students
know more than the teacher. Having the
highest level of certi�cation adds to your
credibility and once you walk through the
CCIE R&S material you’ll have seen most of the things you can do with a router or switch.
To me, pursuing CCIE was not a matter of should I do it but a matter of how am i going to
do this! Once the idea of CCIE popped into my mind it started to grow until I couldn’t stop
thinking about it.
So why did it take so long to become certi�ed? As I am writing this it took me 4-5 years to
turn the idea of becoming CCIE into reality. Let me tell you why it took so long…
There’s always something…

One of the di�culties of CCIE is that there
is a LOT of material to cover and it takes
a LOT of time to do it. There are no
shortcuts and you need to work hard to
make it to the end. I passed my CCIE
written on 13 September 2013 and did the
lab on 12 December 2013, between those
two days were 3 months of full-time
studying, 6 days a week doing 8 to 10
3 of 16 08/16/2017 03:30 AM
hours of labbing per day.
In those 3 months I only did labs, labs and even more labs. I already spent a lot of time
reading all the di�erent CCIE books the last couple of years. I was lucky enough being
able to study full time, if you have to do this next to a full-time job you will have to do
everything in the weekends and evenings.
This means you probably have to give up an entire year of free time, spending all of your
time preparing for CCIE.
That was the biggest problem for me because there’s always something else you
want/have to do. For me there were courses to teach, interesting projects, cool movies to
watch, fun things to do with friends/family and so on.
If you want my #1 advice for passing the CCIE lab I’ll give it to you right now:
Book your CCIE written exam right now. Stop reading my story and book your
exam immediately.Once you pass the CCIE written exam you book the lab exam
ASAP!
Don’t plan to do it but do it right now. Get your credit card and book a seat. I did my
CCIE written back in 2010 but my mistake was not to pay for the lab right away. As a
result I would study hard for a few weeks and then slack o� for a couple of months. My
CCIE written got expired and I had to do it again. If you don’t book the exam and lab
ASAP it will always remain some “commitment” in the future that will never occur. As
soon as you pay for it it becomes de�nite and something will shift in your brain.
For me, CCIE suddenly wasn’t something I would do sometime but it became very clear…I
had to get rid of all distractions because…
“
12 December 2013 was judgment day!
You need to �gure out for yourself how bad you want to become CCIE. Are you able to
4 of 16 08/16/2017 03:30 AM
commit yourself to this and spend all your spare time studying and doing labs for a long
time? Spend less time with your spouse, friends and family? Stop doing all the fun things
you enjoy doing?
If so…keep reading!
Plan the work and work the plan…

You want to become a CCIE, there’s nothing stopping you….good! Now you need a battle
plan to conquer the enemy that is the lab. You could easily spend days reading about
CCIE strategies but extremely simpli�ed this is what you should do:
1. Get support from your spouse, boss, friends and family.

2. Book the CCIE written exam ASAP.
3. After passing the CCIE written exam, book your lab ASAP.
4. Buy all the required CCIE books, take a look at my CCIE book reading list.
5. Buy CCIE training material from one of the vendors (I’ll tell you about it in a bit).
6. Study, study, study.
7. Pass the lab.
Get support
Before you dive into the technical stu� you
should get support from the people close
to you, talk to them about the CCIE exam
especially if they never heard about it
before. Most people are only used to
studying a few days or weeks for an exam
and that’s it. Since you are going to
commit to CCIE for a long time everyone
around you should understand this and
support you.
Talk about it with your spouse, make sure they understand you will spend a lot time
5 of 16 08/16/2017 03:30 AM
behind your computer looking at diagrams with squares and circles typing mumbo
jumbo in a terminal screen. Make CCIE a goal not just for yourself but for the two of you
or your family. Once you pass the lab your career might go fast forward so make sure
you are all on the same team.
See if your boss can give you extra time o� for your preparation. Make sure he/she
understands that it’s not just a personal goal but having a CCIE at the company can have
advantages. Extra time is especially important in the �nal preparation for your lab exam.
Another form of support that is highly recommend is having a study partner. Just make
sure he/she is just as committed as you are and that the two of you are on the same
level.
I don’t have a boss but I talked about it with my girlfriend and explained that it would
take me roughly 3 months of studying full time. She supported me all the way through
while I locked myself up in my Cisco cave…
Book the CCIE written exam

Like I explained before, there is always something in between. Get one of the CCIE
written books out there, study for it and pass the exam. This is something you have to
get out of the way so you can focus on your real goal….the CCIE lab.
CCIE Books
You can �nd the books that I read in my CCIE Book Reading List post that I created
earlier.
CCIE Training Material

This is an important step in your preparation. When you are studying you can read
books, build some labs of your own but what you really need is a complete package.
There are many vendors like INE.com, IPexpert, Narbik and such that sell complete CCIE
R&S self-study packages. I used the workbooks from INE.com so let me explain a little
6 of 16 08/16/2017 03:30 AM
what their workbooks are about.
There are 4 workbooks:
Volume 1: Advanced Technology Labs

Volume 2: Full-Scale Practice Labs
Volume 3: Advanced Foundation Labs
Volume 4: Advanced Troubleshooting
The �rst workbook has labs where you focus on 1 topic at a time, you’ll see
everything….OSPF, EIGRP, BGP, MPLS and so on. Everything from the CCIE blueprint.
Volume 2 has 20 labs that are similar to the real lab.
Volume 3 is all about speed, to help you con�gure the layer 2 and 3 portion of the real
lab as fast as you can. Volume 4 has troubleshooting labs. These are pre-con�gured
networks with errors so you can become a better troubleshooter.
The advantage of a complete training package is that you don’t have to waste your time
at thinking up labs and building network topologies. Most of these vendors o�er you a
complete package and you can use rack rentals so you don’t have to worry about any
hardware. Personally, I wasted a lot of time trying to make things work with GNS3 or real
hardware. I think it’s better to use rack rentals so you can spend 100% of your time at
studying.
Study
This is where the real work starts…there
are many di�erent study plans but I’ll tell
you what I did.
Back in 2010 when I started studying the

�rst thing I did was book the CCIE written
exam, pass it and read the books that I
found on the di�erent CCIE reading lists. I
7 of 16 08/16/2017 03:30 AM
would read one book at a time and then

create some labs for myself to try the
things I read about in the book. I did this to make sure I fully understood everything. I
also created mindmaps and saved a lot of commands / con�guration examples in
notepad, there’s so much to remember so you need to write down the stu� you learn.
Between 2010 and 2013 I started working on the INE.com material, spending a few weeks
doing volume 1 and volume 2 labs and then I got distracted again with work / other
things to do.
Once again, the best advice I can give you is to book your CCIE written exam
right now and once you get the results, pay for your Lab exam right away. Don’t
wait for the “perfect” moment when you feel ready to book the exam because
there is never a perfect moment…
12 September 2013 I passed my CCIE written again and I immediately paid for my lab
seat for 12 December 2013 (the last seat I could get for late December). I started studying
monday to saturday from 9:00am – 9:00pm, this is what my schedule looked like:
First 5 – 6 weeks I only did INE volume 1.

20 days doing full scale labs from INE volume 2.
A week or so troubleshooting INE volume 4 labs.
A week building up my speed with INE volume 3 labs.
The remaining weeks I spent redoing full scale labs from INE volume 2 and repeating
some mini labs that I had a hard time memorizing.
For me this worked very well. I liked the idea of starting with one workbook and �nishing
it before I moved to the next one. The last 2 weeks before the lab I dreamt about BGP,
OSPF and the lab exam every day.
8 of 16 08/16/2017 03:30 AM
These colored pens were my best friends for the 3 months I studied fulltime, I used them
for drawing all those network diagrams. Unfortunately I wasn’t allowed to bring them
with me to the lab.
The Lab
The day before the lab I didn’t do anything except relax and play some games. If you
enjoy working out, this is a perfect day for it. It’s better to save your mental energy for
the exam and studying one more day wouldn’t make a di�erence anymore at this point.
My lab was in Diegem (Brussels – Belgium) and is only about 110 kilometer away from
where I live. I booked a hotel anyway because I didn’t want to risk getting stuck in tra�c
on the exam day.
I woke up at 7:00am and went for breakfast, ate food that �lled me enough so I wouldn’t
get hungry during the exam before lunch. The reception at Cisco opened at 8:30am but I
was already there at 8:00am so I walked around the building for a bit. I don’t get anxious
Some other exam candidates showed up and we had some small talk about CCIE before
the reception opened.
At the reception you have to register and you get some sticker that you are here for the
CCIE exam. We had to wait for the proctor to show up and the silence was deadly.
Everyone is nervous / anxious so nobody talked much. Finally the proctor showed up and
we went to the CCIE lab room.
The lab room was good. There is plenty of

space between you and the other exam
candidates, you have your own desk with
a 24 inch monitor, some sheets of paper
to draw on and some pencils. The quality
9 of 16 08/16/2017 03:30 AM
of the pencils was terrible, I had a hard

time drawing with them but I didn’t use
them much anyway. I’m not sure which
exact keyboard I had but I think it was a Logitech MK200 or something similar.
Next to the lab room is another room with equipment and you hear some slight
background noise. You might want to bring a sweater or something because if you sit still
all day long you might get cold. The proctor explained us some of the rules during the
exam. Next to the lab room there is a co�ee machine and some toilets, whenever we
wanted to use one of them we could just do it, there was no need to ask the proctor for
permission to leave your desk.
The computer that you use has a webbrowser so you can use the support section
(DocCD) and it has putty so you can connect to your lab. Normally a right mouse click in
Putty will let you paste something but they changed it so you can get a little pop-up
screen when you have to select “paste”. I didn’t mind this but you might want to try this
at home.
Troubleshooting section
I did version 4 of the lab so it started with a 2 hour troubleshooting section. It takes a few
minutes to get used to the computer and getting over the “I am �nally here – it’s time to
dance” feeling, once I relaxed a little I started looking at the tickets and the topology. I
won’t go into the details of what the topology or tickets looked like but it took me ~ 30
minutes to solve half of them which felt good. I spent another hour on the remaining
tickets and verifying my work and then clicked the “end session” button since I felt I
solved all of them. The cool thing is that you can spend those remaining minutes on the
con�guration section.
Configuration section
After the troubleshooting section I felt pretty con�dent since I solved all the tickets (at
least that’s what I thought). If you feel you didn’t do very well at troubleshooting then it’s
going to be a pain to work on the the con�guration section for the next 6 hours…
10 of 16 08/16/2017 03:30 AM
I started out spending 10 – 15 minutes looking at the tasks and topology diagrams,
seeing if I could combine some things or if there were any pitfalls. There was a LOT of
stu� to con�gure and time management is a huge deal. When I started con�guring things
I didn’t even touch the console of any of the devices…
I did everything in notepad. By now you should be able to dream all the commands so I
created entire sections in notepad and later pasted them on the devices. When I made a
typing error I �xed it in notepad and then pasted everything back on the device.
After ~ 3 hours of con�guration I was done

but still had to verify everything. I spent
the remaining ~ 3 hours (I had 30 minutes
extra that I saved from the
troubleshooting section) to read each and
every task…line-by-line and verify the
output on my devices with show
commands. Imagine that you are using a
�ne haircomb…do not assume that
something is correct and check
everything. I found a few silly errors and �xed them and I believe this was the key to my
success. It’s also the only moment where I checked the DocCD to verify 1 -2 little things
that I wasn’t sure of.
About 20 minutes before the session ended I was done and hitted the “end session”
button. I felt good about it but was also happy that it was over. After 8 hours of non-stop
focus you get tired so I left the building, took my car and drove home with some nice
background music.
Conclusion
So what can I say about this entire very long journey? First of all…I really enjoyed it! I
never had to study so much and for so long and once you make it to the �nish it feels
totally awesome! I learned a lot about discipline by doing labs day after day and putting a
lot of hours in it. I can fully understand if someone never wants to do it again but
11 of 16 08/16/2017 03:30 AM
personally, I see myself doing another CCIE in the future.
The troubleshooting section is really good, I felt that it really tests you on an expert level
and you get enough time for the tickets. The con�guration system I didn’t like as much
because of two reasons:
The amount of con�guration required: Sometimes I felt the test was about typing
speed and being able to use notepad to quickly generate con�gurations for all the
devices. I’d rather see a higher di�culty that requires more time to think. The lab
should be like a chess game, not an endurance race.
The grading system: The way the exam is graded is poor…very poor if you ask me.
You only get points for an entire section so if you get the section correct you get 100%
of the points. If you missed one little item then you get 0 points. Imagine there is a
BGP section with 15 tasks, if you managed to con�gure 14 tasks correctly but messed
up 1 then you get 0 points. There is no partial credit. The way it is graded is to make
you fail…
The CCIE lab exam is supposed to check if you are an expert or not. If you give points for
each correctly con�gured task then you can check if someone understood the question
and award them. Shooting down someone because they “only” con�gured 99.99% of the
section correctly sounds weird to me.
Anyway I hope you enjoyed this post of my CCIE adventure and that it encourages you on
your own CCIE journey. If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment! Keep in
mind that I can’t answer any (technical) questions about the exam contents because of
the CCIE NDA.
Next Lesson
Where to start for CCIE Routing &
Switching
»
12 of 16 08/16/2017 03:30 AM
 Tags: Personal Development
Forum Replies
system
July 6, 2014
Hello Rene,
Very Nice reading. What about ccie v5? I took a look at your book list, no books for the 5th version.
Do you have somme information about it? New books maybe?
Thann you.
ReneMolenaar
September 11, 2014
Hi Saya,
Thanks for your kind words It sounds like a good idea so I'll create a video for this. I'll make one
where I use CDP to draw a quick network diagram and con�gure L2 / L3 using notepad on a
topology with 4 switches and 8-9 routers. Only takes a couple of minutes.
Rene
ciscosnow
February 14, 2015
Hi Rene,
I got half of the books on your list, I pass my CCNP so What do I need to study for the written
exam?
Please advise
sfarmehdi
August 20, 2015
13 of 16 08/16/2017 03:30 AM
Hi Rene,
How do you create "entire sections in notepad ".
Do you create one notepad �le per device, or do you have everything written into one single
notepad �le. If so, how do you do exactly?
Meaning there are so many con�gurations & devices so we can get quickly confused...
Also, did you draw some sections or the entire diagram?
Congrats again, and thank you
Mehdi
rafaeltirado2
December 2, 2016
In the lab are we allowed to enable console logging? I heard console logging is turned o� on
purpose. I think they could be helpful when troubleshooting if we could turn them on, i just don't
know if we are allowed.
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Cisco CCIE Routing & Switching V4 Experience |... https://networklessons.com/cisco/ccie-routing-swi...

Cisco CCIE Routing & Switching V4 Experience

Where to start for CCIE Routing & Switching

Cisco CCIE R&S Book Reading List

How to use the “Doc CD”

Useful links on the Doc CD

 Unit 10: Quality of Service

 Unit 11: Security

 Unit 12: System Management

 Unit 13: Network Services

 Unit 14: MPLS

You are here: Home » Cisco » CCIE Routing & Switching

Cisco CCIE Routing & Switching V4

Friday the 13th, 5:45am in the

I jump out of my bed and sprint faster

It starts with a dream…

There’s always something…

hours of labbing per day.

Plan the work and work the plan…

1. Get support from your spouse, boss, friends and family.

Book the CCIE written exam

CCIE Training Material

what their workbooks are about.

There are 4 workbooks:

Volume 1: Advanced Technology Labs

Back in 2010 when I started studying the

would read one book at a time and then

First 5 – 6 weeks I only did INE volume 1.

The lab room was good. There is plenty of

of the pencils was terrible, I had a hard

After ~ 3 hours of con�guration I was done

personally, I see myself doing another CCIE in the future.

 Tags: Personal Development

How do you create "entire sections in notepad ".

Also, did you draw some sections or the entire diagram?

Congrats again, and thank you

© 2013 - 2017 NetworkLessons.com 11681

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