Cisco Live 2010 - The First 36 Hours

A quick update on my Cisco Live 2010 experience. On Sunday I attended an OTV labtorial. It was quite useful; I'm getting more confident in going that direction for an upcoming data center relocation project.

On Monday I attended the first half of an MPLS Security session. It was good, but I had to leave prematurely to take my Cisco exam. I feel like the 2nd half would have been great though, so I've made a note to revisit that one after it gets posted to www.ciscolivevirtual.com.

I passed my CCDE written exam, with a score between the first attempt (good score, during the beta) and my second attempt at Cisco Live 2009. I don't care much about what score I receive on an exam, provided it is a passing score, but I'm glad to see my score went up from last year.

I'm sitting on a Panel discussion on VPN right now. I don't think I have attended a Panel session before, and I was really missing out. This session is highly interactive, with no Powerpoint slides. Great info on GETVPN, DMVPN and a bit of EasyVPN info. The crowd isn't too interested in EasyVPN though, so the presenter responsible for that is having an easy time with this session. I am registered for a second Panel tomorrow on IPv6 Deployment Experiences, which should be great. It was a tough call registering for that, as there is also a LISP Panel at the same time. They are right next door to each other, so I may slide over to the LISP session if I'm not getting much out of the IPv6 one.

Speaking of LISP, my next session is "LISP - A Next Generation Networking Architecture". I attended this session last year and found it fascinating, but I never got a chance to follow-up on the content at home. I spoke briefly with Dino Farnacci (one of the protocol authors). He said there is a bunch of new content in this year's presentation. I finally have a use-case in my network, if I end up utilizing OTV to extend Layer-2 between my data centers during my upcoming DC migration. The Internet use-case is very cool, but I don't see a good reason to jump on board anytime soon. The list of attendees for this session is quite impressive. There are plenty of influential industry voices, so I hope the presentation goes well. If it does, the roll-out of LISP will benefit greatly.