Congrats to my 70th successful CCDE student, Greg P.! Greg attended my most recent CCDE Practical Bootcamp in Orlando, Florida. He is among six students who passed the exam during the May 19th exam date. Congratulations to all of you, and good luck to those who are planning to take the exam later in 2015. For those who passed, please consider joining the LinkedIn Group for certified CCDEs. It is a low-volume group exclusively for discussions amongst CCDEs. Over half of all active CCDEs have joined, so you will have access to an incredible amount of Cisco design knowledge. Recent discussions have centered around the CCAr program and IPv6 deployment. Don't miss out on the fun!
Cisco Live San Diego
After a one year absence I will be back at Cisco Live this year in San Diego (Please Cisco, don’t ever hold Cisco Live in May again; it is too difficult to travel at the end of the school year). I can’t wait to meet up with old friends and meet new ones. I will be attending the CCIE/DE NetVet reception with John Chambers (for the last time, how bittersweet) and new CEO Chuck Robbins. I will also be at the CCIE/DE party on Tuesday evening. If any of my CCDE students (past, current or future) needs a date to the party, let me know and I will get you in (first come, first serve; I only get one guest). If anyone wants to discuss the CCDE program or my training while in San Diego, please reach out to me via email or Twitter (@jfilliben) so we can catch up. The CCDE program is closing in on 300 certified individuals, which means I am 100% confident that it has ‘caught on’ and will continue to grow like the CCIE R/S, Voice and Service Provider programs. Now if only Cisco will do something on the partner side to increase the value of this amazing certification. I’ll dig around for news and rumors at Cisco Live. If you will be there be sure to let me know so we can meet up. I plan to spend time at the Social Media area, and I will also attempt to be at the New Attendee meet-up on Sunday (I volunteered to be a mentor to a new attendee this year).
Upcoming Training
If you are looking for CCDE training, my next five-day CCDE Practical bootcamp class is scheduled for the week of October 18th in Dubai, UAE. This will be my final classroom training event of the year, and unfortunately I won't be able to offer it remotely from this training location. If that date or location is inconvenient for you, my Self-Paced Online CCDE Practice Exam Training is always available to suit your schedule. I have also scheduled a refresher Webex for August 1st for any of my students who are preparing for the August 19th CCDE Practical exam date. Send me an email if you would like to attend.
If you need convincing to attend my training, take a look at this sampling of student feedback from 2015:
“I just wanted to drop you a quick note to thank you for the bootcamp in April. It was a great experience. I took the CCDE practical exam on May 19th and passed. I am now CCDE 2015xxxx”
“I would like to share with you that I achieved my CCDE yesterday! I am very happy!!! Thanks for your class, it helped me a lot to have the overall impression of the exam. It made it more clear.”
“Just want to let you know that I've passed the exam! Thank you for the insights and hints to find the answers. Really appreciate the course.”
“I was about to write you an email and say a big 'thank you' to you. You helped me a lot to pass this exam. I appreciate it and never forget it.”
“Jeremy, You now have 55 students that passed. Thanks for the great material!”
Interesting Projects
I’ve been working on a number of new projects for a Fortune 500 financial company. I plan to write a few blog posts detailing the design aspects of these projects. Here is a short list. If you have any specific interest in hearing about these, let me know which one(s) to prioritize:
Cisco iWAN deployment - Encrypted DMVPN over the Internet and carrier L3VPN. I started on this before iWAN was published, so I thought it was quite innovative. Now that Cisco has caught up to and passed me on this technology I am playing catch up. :)
AnyConnect over IPv6 - Deploying AnyConnect over IPv6 Internet for access to IPv4 resources
WAN Core Separation - Splitting up a WAN core consisting of two locations into individual IGPs and BGP ASNs. If you’ve read my blog long enough (or scroll waaaay back) you will remember when we reduced the core from three -> two locations. This project will take us to the logical conclusion. I have a Meet The Engineer scheduled at Cisco Live to work out the details concerning Performance Routing for this new design. I expect this project to occupy a large amount of my post-Cisco Live work attention :)
Campus LAN Refreshes - Is it time for white box switching in a large L3 campus? Does Meraki scale to the required size? Or is it time for my dream of an all-wireless campus LAN (probably not yet, but soon)?
Thanks for reading this far.. Please let me know what interesting projects you are working on; I am always on the lookout for new ideas.
Jeremy
