Monday, January 9, 2017

CCIE DCv2: Part I - Preparation

Ariel Liguori 5:46 PM

Well I think that here things get more exciting, lets talk about preparation that I face for CCIE DC, v1 and also v2.

As you may notice I've failed v1, it was in April of this year, and fail by so little (literally, doing maths it was about 2 points..,), for that (v1) my prep was based on:

INE CCIE v1 bootcamp (Nexus Switching)
Lot of knowledge of Nexus / UCS
Minimal rack lab practice...

As you may notice, being confident could be one of your biggest enemy, so instead of thinking that you may know something is better if you can practice (a lot) to get faster and confident for real lab.

So lets forget v1 and start talking of v2, lot of new stuff: UCS Central, UCS Director, VXLAN, Cisco AVS and, as you may know, ACI.

Lets summarize:

UCS Central / UCS Director

For this Cisco community and particularly DevNet workflows was the best, also I practice a lot basic tasks like creating pools, tshooting pool asignments (from UCS C) and from Director side I created basic workflows like configure vlans, service profiles and some ACI workflows.

VXLAN

This is the real hard topic to cover, not in theory or technology but really in config section. For this I really tried to use Cisco Documentation but wasn't enough, so further reading follow me to this GREAT presentation: BRKDCT-2404 VXLAN Deployment Models - A Practical Perspective

Also to tackle VXLAN I followed this:

- Understand control plane options: Flood and Learn & BGP EVPN

- Understand how to configure in the different nexus families: Nexus 5K & Nexus 7K, Cisco documentation is good for N5K but not so good for 7K, let say that scenarios presented are not complete at all and are so different from a real case, I made a review of those documents but didn't get a reply from cisco yet. A workaround that I've found for such poor doc at 7K was using 9K documentation in NX-OS mode, configuration is pretty much the same :)
Those are the docs I've used:

VXLAN @7K: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/sw/nx-os/vxlan/configuration/guide/b_NX-OS_VXLAN_Configuration_Guide/overview.html

VXLAN @5K: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/nexus5600/sw/layer2/7x/b_5600_Layer2_Config_7x/b_5600_Layer2_Config_7x_chapter_010010.html

VXLAN @9K: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/switches/nexus-9000-series-switches/118978-config-vxlan-00.html

Programmability

One of the interesting topics was about programmability in ACI, I really love Python and this point wasn't a headache to me, if it is to you you will be able to find great tutorials on the web (I will also write down some in a few days), if you have some knowledge and you are familiar with data model of ACI and terminology you can go directly to Cisco Developers page, amazing doc there: https://developer.cisco.com/media/apicDcPythonAPI_v0.1/install.html

ACI

Last but definitely not least is ACI, as you can imagine (I figured it out at least), Cisco will push you to use this new tech that they acquire a few years ago. Actually there is no good content related ACI from any partner or learning vendor, I took a quick look at Jason Lunde and other videos, but they where so so introductory that you really need further info. In my case I achieve that by setting up a POD several times and facing all kind of errors, I focused on what I though that it was the key objectives of having ACI deployed, and for me that was:

- Setting up VMM integration

- Deploying Contracts between EPG and Tenants

- Customizing several Fabric configurations (It's well known that in a CCIE Exam they can ask you to change whenever option is available at the interface, so be prepared)

- Deploy a L2 Out connection

- Deploy an L3 Out connection

- Share L3/L2 between tenants

For all this I really recommend to use and see Cisco Community, that was really helpful, Tomas De Leon (a TAC guy who wrote there) uploads very useful documents about how to configure APIC. And again, get a lot of hands on experience in this topic, ACI have a lot of errors and you have to get familiar with them, if you have no previous experience start with a video series to get familiar with concepts and after that book your labs, get an image or us dCloud but be sure to get hands on :)

In all of this process I've spend like three months, practicing every day with CCIE HOME guys and mock lab scenarios, I can tell for sure that I've tested much more that what I've found on real lab so when I saw real scenario I didn't feel scared (well just a little). In next posts I will write down about overall lab experience and recommendations, hope this would be helpful for all aspirants for this AMAZING TRACK.

ACI , CCIE , CCIE LAB , Cobra , DC , DCv2 , EVPN , NEXUS , UCS , UCSC , UCSD , VXLAN

Article By: Ariel Liguori

CCIE DC #55292 / VCIX-NV / JNCIP "Network Architect mainly focused on SDN/NFV, Openstack adoption, Datacenter technologies and automations running on top of it :) "