How to Become CCDE

Wow. I still can't believe it.

The moment I clicked Next at the end of the CCDE practical exam today in London, and it showed Congratulations word, I was literally jumping out my chair. It was a bad move, I admit, because it was really distracting and it made many other candidates in the room to look at me furiously since we still had more than an hour to complete this 352-011 exam. But I couldn't help it. I passed!

I'm a CCDE now. Part of the group consists around 100 people only, in the world. Wow. Thank God.
(I haven't received my number yet. So I hope CCDE team don't change their mind)


How did I prepare for CCDE exam?

Well, it's been a long journey. I passed my first CCDE written exam four years ago. I have taken the practical exam when it was version v1.0. And now I passed with v2.0.

Before I took the exam today I thought I would have lots of things to write about my preparation for CCDE exam. But I'm typing this while having my "CCDE dinner" at Hard Rock Cafe in London, and I can only came up with Continue reading

Scale, SDN, and Network Virtualization

[This post was put together by Teemu Koponen, Andrew Lambeth, Rajiv Ramanathan, and Martin Casado]

Scale has been an active (and often contentious) topic in the discourse around SDN (and by SDN we refer to the traditional definition) long before the term was coined. Criticism of the work that lead to SDN argued that changing the model of the control plane from anything but full distribution would lead to scalability challenges. Later arguments reasoned that SDN results in *more* scalable network designs because there is no longer the need to flood the entire network state in order to create a global view at each switch. Finally, there is the common concern that calls into question the scalability of using traditional SDN (a la OpenFlow) to control physical switches due to forwarding table limits.

However, while there has been a lot of talk, there have been relatively few real-world examples to back up the rhetoric. Most arguments appeal to reason, argue (sometimes convincingly) from first principles, or point to related but ultimately different systems.

The goal of this post is to add to the discourse by presenting some scaling data, taken over a two-year period, from a production network virtualization Continue reading

How much are you worth per hour

[This content was originally published on thenetworksherpa.com] Have you ever sat at your desk repeating the same task again and again, getting that groundhog day feeling. Arrrghhh, this is so inefficient someone should automate this. I could even do it myself with five days of focussed work. Sadly, you don’t have five days and the […]

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John Harrington

John is an experienced data center engineer with a background in mobile telecoms. He works as a network test engineer for a large cloud service provider, and is gradually accepting that he's a nerd. He blogs about network technology and careers at theNetworkSherpa.com. You can reach him on twitter at: @networksherpa

The post How much are you worth per hour appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by John Harrington.

Teamwork in a Disconnected Environment

As an introvert, I don’t like ice breakers or team building exercises at team meetings. Building the team camaraderie is done slowly over time with peers you work with. Daily interactions during work help build that as engineers learn to trust each other. What about for a team that does not interact with each other […]

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Charles Galler

Charles Galler

Charles is a network and UC engineer for an integrator. He has worked in the networking industry for about 15 years. He started as a network administrator for a small CLEC (carrier) where he did it all in internal IT and worked on the carrier network. After the CLEC, Charles went to work for a large healthcare organization in the Houston area and stayed with them for about three and a half years. Now he works for a reseller in the professional services part of the organization. He is currently studying for his CCIE in Routing and Switching and plans on passing it sometime. You can find him on the Twitter @twidfeki.
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The post Teamwork in a Disconnected Environment appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Charles Galler.

Your Company Doesn’t Care About You

  Companies are Systems for Making Money We’ve all heard corporate leadership speak about ‘human resources’ and that ‘people are our most important asset’. This is true but the words ‘resource’ and ‘asset’ were carefully chosen. A resource is something to be mined for value. Please don’t be fooled into thinking that your company cares […]

Author information

John Harrington

John is an experienced data center engineer with a background in mobile telecoms. He works as a network test engineer for a large cloud service provider, and is gradually accepting that he's a nerd. He blogs about network technology and careers at theNetworkSherpa.com. You can reach him on twitter at: @networksherpa

The post Your Company Doesn’t Care About You appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by John Harrington.

[Code] PowerTool: PowerOnUCSBlades

# ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # Name: PowerOnUCSBlades.ps1 # Author: Matthew Oswalt # Created: 3/30/2012 # Revision: v0.2 - BETA # Rev. Date: 4/30/2013 # Description: A script that powers on blades in a UCS system. # Can be configured to boot all blades, or # only those associated to service profiles in a # given sub-organization. # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # Import the Cisco UCS PowerTool module Import-Module CiscoUcsPs #Enable Multiple System Config Mode Set-UcsPowerToolConfiguration -SupportMultipleDefaultUcs $true ##################################################################################################################### # AUTHENTICATION # #################################### #Stored method of authentication - change the two values shown below $user = "admin" $password = "password" | ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText -Force $cred = New-Object system.

[Code] PowerTool: PowerOnUCSBlades

———————————————————————- # Name: PowerOnUCSBlades.ps1 # Author: Matthew Oswalt # Created: 3/30/2012 # Revision: v0.2 - BETA # Rev. Date: 4/30/2013 # Description: A script that powers on blades in a UCS system. # Can be configured to boot all blades, or # only those associated to service profiles in a # given sub-organization. # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # Import the Cisco UCS PowerTool module Import-Module CiscoUcsPs #Enable Multiple System Config Mode Set-UcsPowerToolConfiguration -SupportMultipleDefaultUcs $true ##################################################################################################################### # AUTHENTICATION # #################################### #Stored method of authentication - change the two values shown below $user = "admin" $password = "password" | ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText -Force $cred = New-Object system.

SDN: Stop Differentiating by Names

Why does it happen with every technology cycle? First, there’s a period of great innovation, followed by the introduction of new terms and categories, which is always followed by a frenzy of differentiation-by-acronym. Everyone gets caught up in talking to each other and one-upping each other, instead of remembering why there was innovation in the first place. I call it “the yearbook effect,” and the networking industry and those who work in it, watch it and write about it are fully entrenched in it right now.

Think about it. SDN, NFV, OpenFlow, controllers, consortiums to build controllers, control plane separation, overlays, blah blah blah.

The industry has gotten so wrapped up in talking about definitions of SDN, the various technologies and how they get implemented, we actually may help delay adoption. We are supposed to be trying to help customers, but we are focusing on the wrong things and it’s confusing them.

I may get kicked out of the SDN fan club for saying this, but I’ve come to the conclusion after speaking to dozens of customers and participating in various industry discussions, any delay in widespread adoption of SDN is our own fault.

People are rarely, if ever, talking Continue reading

Show 148 – Talking With OpenDaylight Leadership

The Packet Pushers are joined by Brent Salisbury of networkstatic.net for a chat with some of the top brass on the OpenDaylight project’s Technical Steering Committee, Dave Meyer and Inder Gopal. “What’s OpenDaylight?” you ask. Why, it’s a consortium of vendors working together under the Linux Foundation umbrella to make an open source reference framework […]

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Ethan Banks

Co-host at Packet Pushers

Ethan Banks, CCIE #20655, has been managing networks for higher ed, government, financials and high tech since 1995. Ethan co-hosts the Packet Pushers Podcast, which has seen over 3M downloads and reaches over 10K listeners. With whatever time is left, Ethan writes for fun & profit, studies for certifications, and enjoys science fiction. @ecbanks
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The post Show 148 – Talking With OpenDaylight Leadership appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

Outgoing Interface Determination

I received a comment on an old post regarding the identification of outgoing interface for learned routes through BGP. In fact, it’s not the first time I’ve had a discussion in the comment section regarding the interaction between the control plane and the forwarding plane. So, let’s work backwards from the point where our packet leaves some interface on a router, which would be considered purely an act of the forwarding plane.

Outgoing Interface Determination

I received a comment on an old post regarding the identification of outgoing interface for learned routes through BGP. In fact, it’s not the first time I’ve had a discussion in the comment section regarding the interaction between the control plane and the forwarding plane. So, let’s work backwards from the point where our packet leaves some interface on a router, which would be considered purely an act of the forwarding plane.

Making sense of Broadband networks – Part 1

Broadband is a hot topic in the telecommunications industry nowadays; it is becoming the bread and butter for so many service providers and mobile carriers with the big growth and penetration rates in these technologies in the recent years.  ( Check this report about the EOCD countries). Although it is that important, broadband topics probably [...] No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Network Design Challenge – Small Little Clouds

At work, we’ve been getting ready to deploy a few different cluster technologies. One is a set of KVM hosts to offer VMaaS functionality to end users. Another is a CEPH cluster (http://ceph.com/) which is smart distributed storage. The third is a Hadoop cluster. Each of these initiatives popped up around the same time and […]

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Mike Kantowski

Mike Kantowski

I started designing and operating data networks in 1999. Since then, I've worked for organizations large and small, and a couple in between. I currently focus on low latency, high frequency financial trading networks.

@netdad on Twitter

The post Network Design Challenge – Small Little Clouds appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Mike Kantowski.

Programming 101 for Network Engineers – Basic Language Elements & Concepts 2

Welcome to the fourth part of the Programming 101 for Network Engineers series and part two of the Basic Language Elements and Concepts article. The following overview of programming language elements and those found in part three will provide a good foundation that can be built upon as we move into other topics and the detail […]

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Steven Iveson

Steven Iveson

Steven Iveson, the last of four children of the seventies, was born in London and has never been too far from a shooting, bombing or riot. He's now grateful to live in a small town in East Yorkshire in the north east of England with his wife Sam and their four children.

He's worked in the IT industry for over 15 years in a variety of roles, predominantly in data centre environments. Working with switches and routers pretty much from the start he now also has a thirst for application delivery, SDN, virtualisation and related products and technologies. He's published a number of F5 Networks related books and is a regular contributor at DevCentral.

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The post Programming 101 for Network Engineers – Basic Language Elements & Concepts 2 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Continue reading

Build a Career with Relationships

Your job hunt traditionally starts with websites like monster.com or dice.com.  However, some surveys suggest that between 70 to 80 percent of jobs are found through personal contacts and relationships. So why not spend your efforts building your relationships instead of surfing jobs sites? I can sense some of you getting uncomfortable already. Dont worry, […]

Author information

John Harrington

John is an experienced data center engineer with a background in mobile telecoms. He works as a network test engineer for a large cloud service provider, and is gradually accepting that he's a nerd. He blogs about network technology and careers at theNetworkSherpa.com. You can reach him on twitter at: @networksherpa

The post Build a Career with Relationships appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by John Harrington.

[Virtual Routing] Part 4 – The Use Case

Moving along in my “Virtual Routing” series, I’d like to switch gears and talk a little more “big picture”. In the previous posts, we’ve discussed a few different things: Part 1 - A first look at the CSR 1000v from Cisco Part 2 - An examinations of using FHRPs in a virtual environment Part 3 - A comparison of virtual routing redundancy options Seeing as these were all pretty technical configuration-oriented posts, I wanted to take a step back and think about some of the reasons why one would want to perform routing in a virtual environment.

[Virtual Routing] Part 4 – The Use Case

Moving along in my “Virtual Routing” series, I’d like to switch gears and talk a little more “big picture”. In the previous posts, we’ve discussed a few different things: Part 1 - A first look at the CSR 1000v from Cisco Part 2 - An examinations of using FHRPs in a virtual environment Part 3 - A comparison of virtual routing redundancy options Seeing as these were all pretty technical configuration-oriented posts, I wanted to take a step back and think about some of the reasons why one would want to perform routing in a virtual environment.

[Virtual Routing] Part 4 – The Use Case

Moving along in my “Virtual Routing” series, I’d like to switch gears and talk a little more “big picture”. In the previous posts, we’ve discussed a few different things: Part 1 - A first look at the CSR 1000v from Cisco Part 2 - An examinations of using FHRPs in a virtual environment Part 3 - A comparison of virtual routing redundancy options Seeing as these were all pretty technical configuration-oriented posts, I wanted to take a step back and think about some of the reasons why one would want to perform routing in a virtual environment.
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