Just got the news after waking up from a nap in my hotel room in SJ! Stunned and ridiculously excited barely describe it! I've got a lot of people to thank but it would be a disservice to not mention my ridiculously beautiful wife and my awesome son first! My wife has put up with my studying for almost 2 years now (and 10lbs of weight gain!) and still hasn't left me! And my son has been incredibly patient for a 6 year old who is used to daddy's undivided attention. I could also mention my employer and friends but they go without saying, the IEOC community for posting so many crazy/awesome threads about weird stuff you're seeing but the only other person I’ll say thanks specifically to is Pablo (plucena24). Dude is insanely smart and was so generous with his time in answering all my stupid questions, giving me small insights into lab strategies and just overall being a really stand up guy. I first met him at the INE SP bootcamp and I really regret not taking the time to get to know him better there (I’m not a very outgoing guy, I keep to myself mostly). But I reached out to him on the forums one time because i was frustrated with a particular technology and he was soooooooo helpful in explaining that and many other techs to me. I absolutely cannot say enough nice things about him or thank him enough for all the help he's given me.
I started studying about 2 years ago right after I got my CCNP. I hadn't worked in networking before so i was considerably behind where most candidates are so I actually started studying INE's R/S material to have a better foundation going into SP. It took me about a year to finish the R/S material where I felt comfortable moving to SP (which I was far more interested in). For probably 90% of my studies I used INE's material. I did purchase the workbook from the other vendor but I would not recommend it. The only thing it did really well provide a vmware tool to allow for really quick start up time for tech focused labs (like INE's Vol 1) but it very much was their R/S workbook copied/pasted with a few SP technologies and XR tacked on. I'd save your money and get INE's R/S workbook on sale rather than buy the other vendors. It must be noted that for people learning the technologies, INE blows the other workbooks out of the water in terms of explanations of technology and explaining what's going on behind the scenes. It's not even really that comparable.
When i started studying I had allot of questions on where to start, for anyone that's going straight from CCNP (R/S, i can't comment on CCNP SP as I haven't really looked at it at all) to CCIE SP I would really recommend using INE's R/S workbook and then going to the SP workbook. I believe that INE's SP workbook accurately coverts 90-100% of the lab (if you combined lab 3 and 4 into one super lab you would have one very good CCIE mock lab), but I don't feel that i would be very useful in the real work for topics like BGP, OSPF, PE-CE routing or several other topics without the work i put in on the R/S workbook.
I don't really have any great "day of" stories, started out like any other day. I arrived about 7:45 so that I could chill in the car and mentally talk myself into "it doesn't matter if i pass or fail" to calm myself down and eliminate nerves (I do this for interviews too, it really works wonders for me). There were 9 total people taking the test (I was surprised to see that man), and I was the only one that dress like a hobo! The morning session went really smooth for me, I wasn't nervous at all and I was moving at a good clip while making sure to verify everything before I moved forward. I thought it was a little stupid that the time was kept on a wall clock and not on the clocks that the computers ran on (there was about a 15-30 in difference in time) but I got used to it. Lunch was not amazing though. The cafeteria was closed for maintenance so we ate out of food carts. I'm quite sure that a lot of people would love the food from these things but I'm not big on exotic food choices and really just wanted a salad or something like that. I ended up eating like 3 or 4 bites of a type of burrito that I can't pronounce and then relied on a protein bar to get me through the rest of the day. I ended up finishing my first pass on the lab around 3pm, I knew I had 2 tasks that weren’t functioning properly but I intended on troubleshooting those on the 2nd pass through. Everything passed verification as expected with the exception of me being stupid and using OSPF instead of EIGRP in one place but it was a quick and easy fix. I'm not sure how much detail i can give on where I got hung up, but there were 3 tasks I was unable to fully get functioning. I really suspect IOU bugs but I honestly couldn't say either way, I saw no problems with my config (and still don't after reviewing documentation and my notes) but I couldn't get these 3 tasks full up and running. With those 3 tasks not working, and one of them being a big one, I went for being hella confident to being genuinely afraid that i failed. All in all though it was a positive experience, the other candidates were very nice and friendly and the proctor was useful on one question for me.
IOU seemed like a mixed blessing to me. On one hand: 10 seconds to reboot a device is frickin awesome but on the other: there were 3 times during my lab that I highlighted a single line of config in order to"no" it out and when I right clicked to paste it pasted an ENTIRE running config in. What's worse is it did this with 4 minutes left in my lab as I was trying to fix one problem. I ended up having to pray that I"wr mem"d and reloaded the device (again, 10 second reloads are AWESOME) but I didn’t' have enough time to do any verification post reload.
For study material, like i said before, I used INE R/S workbook, SP workbook, related ATCs (thank you 2 year ultimate AAP!) and other vids on INE's site. I didn't do a ton of reading as I have a hard time learning that way. TCP/IP vol 1 & 2 in the beginning, L2VPN Architectures, QoS for IP/MPLS Networks, and MPLS fundamentals were read to varying degrees. I went to the INE bootcamp but in all honesty I really didn't find it useful. I'm positive that others would disagree, and it's one of those things that you get back what you put into it, but as I said I’m not a very outgoing person so I don't like to ask a ton of questions when I’m not sure if they are wasting people's time.
To INE, thank you for amazing study material. I would not have every passed this sucker without you. My one suggestion: come through with the SP graded mock labs that were promised in Oct 2012. I WANTED to give you 200 bucks per graded mock lab but you wouldn't take my money!!! :-) Or come up with a few more full-scale labs for the workbook, 4 just aren't enough as you start to memorize them way too quick. The old SP workbook had at least 8 full labs in it, which seems like a great number!
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Sorry for rambling, thanks again to everyone that I’ve said thanks to and anyone I didn't that deserves thanks! People generally ask "what's next", for me it's Hawaii for 10 days starting Monday! Then I’ll polish off CCDP as a target of opportunity and then instead of another CCIE I’m going to pursue the Alcatel-Lucent Service Routing Architect certification.
Mud