CCNP Day 1

As I begin tonight on my completion of the CCNP certification, I read the intro chapter #1 of Cisco Press' CCNP Route 642-902 by Wendell Odom. My goal is to finish this certification in 7 weeks from today, or rather to test on June 17.

Breaking that down, it's about 100 pages each day to study. I'm planning to work through about 20 each day.

One thing that I wish I had paid closer attention to over the past couple years was my original intent to maintain my CCNA skills. When I achieved that certification in 2009, I intended to continually work through labs where I don't have much exposure at work. This was intended to keep me sharp and ready for recertification or upgrading to the CCNP. Well, today when I took the first "Do I know this" quiz, I realized that I haven't been designing or supporting any EIGRP over the last couple years and I have a bit of catching up to do. I work more with firewalls and switches in my daily job, and do very little (if any) routing. So....now I have some catching up to do.

But I am pretty pumped to get going. I was surprised to read that Cisco has removed QoS from the CCNP requirements. I was hoping to delve into that a bit in the near future to enable me to more efficiently support Cisco's Voice offering which my company recently began selling like crazy.

So today I read about the exam topics and some thoughts about how to prepare for them. There is a large design and documentation component to the CCNP, which include determining resources required, creating an implementation plan and creating a verification plan all before configuring and verifying the solution. After these, results are documented.

While there is no single planning style recommended by Cisco, their PPDIOO model seems most natural to my style. The steps involved here are:

1. Prepare
2. Plan
3. Design
4. Implement
5. Operate
6. Optimize

These are the steps of the Cisco Lifestyle Services, and it seems to me to make the most sense - that or I work in a Cisco shop and that's all I know. Either way, it will get the job done. I also am glad to see the focus on planning and documentation in the CCNP objectives. Working in a support role where I inherit various networks from all kinds of different vendors, I'm always amazed at how little anyone plans or documents when they build a network. More commonly, people throw components together without any thought or consideration for support, and when I finally get the call it's usually pretty ugly. Great for my troubleshooting skills, not great for a customer who relies on their network to get their job done.

So, here we go. For the next week I'll be working on EIGRP neighbors, topology, routes and convergence. It was incredibly valuable to me when studying for the CCNA to summarize my nightly work in a blog, so I'll be doing that here instead of on my personal blog to keep the geek stuff apart from the stuff regular people might be interested in. Feel free to comment, let me know what you think or if you have any words of wisdom for my study. Especially comment if I make a mistake or don't explain something well enough - I want this to be a quick reference for my review as well and can't afford to have mistakes in the info.

OK, then. CCNP Route exam in 7 weeks. Away we go...