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I am currently reading Team of Teams, an excellent book!

In it, it highlights an interesting fact that I think is very relevant for the networking world and that is the difference between something that is complicated versus something that is complex.

I recently completed the entry level Juniper certification. I thought it would be a good idea to study for something other than the mighty Cisco, so Juniper’s JNCIA-Junos seemed like a good choice.

It was a very fair exam I can highly recommend.

By now, VxLAN is becoming the standard way of tunneling in the Datacenter.

Using VxLAN, i will show how to use the CSR1Kv to extend your Datacenter L2 reach between sites as well.

First off, what is VxLAN?

It stands for Virtual Extensible LAN. Basically you have a way of decoupling your vlan’s into a new scheme.

In this post i would like to highlight a couple of “features” of ISIS.

More specifically the authentication mechanism used and how it looks in the data plane.

I will do this by configuring a couple of routers and configure the 2 authentication types available. I will then look at packet captures taken from the link between them and illustrate how its used by the ISIS process.

Hello folks,

Im currently going through the INE DC videos and learning a lot about fabrics and how they work along with a fair bit of UCS information on top of that!

Im spending an average of 2.5 hours on weekdays for study and a bit more in the weekends when time permits.

New Server:

So I just completed a purchase off eBay for a new server for my lab purposes.

For a while now I’ve been limited to 32Gb of memory on my old ESXi server, which is really more like 20Gb when my regular servers have had their share. Running a combination of different types of devices, each taking at least 4Gb of memory, doesn’t leave much room for larger labs.

Yesterday I passed the CCNA-W exam. Now onto the next partner certification I need to do before summer.

Its called 500-452 ENCWE – Enterprise Networks Core and WAN Essentials and a large part of it involves iWAN, which im not too familiar with.

Wednesday the 22nd of February, in a testing center in the middle of London, my journey towards achieving the CCDE certification, finally ended in me passing this beast of an exam.

This learning journey was a very different one than either of my CCIE’s. Whereas going for the CCIE meant spending countless hours at the command-line, the CCDE meant spending all of those hours reading and discussing use cases for technologies. It also meant stepping my toes into the business side, picking up the “Why?” behind selecting a specific technology.

In this post I would like to give a demonstration of using the Auto-Tunnel Mesh group feature.

As you may know, manual MPLS-TE tunnels are first and foremost unidirectional, meaning that if you do them between two PE nodes, you have to do a tunnel in each direction with the local PE node being the headend.

In case you are serious about going for the CCDE certification, I highly recommend you check out my friend Martin Duggan’s new lab(s) on Leanpub. His writing style is very good and its easy to follow along and i look forward to hitting this lab myself.

First off, lets take a look at the topology I will be using for this example:

Everything works, and we the math is right, we should see an NHRP shortcut being created for the Spoke to Spoke tunnel:

The exam has been documented elsewhere, so i wont spend much time on it here. Suffice it to say its a difficult beast 🙂

I am fortunate enough, to be able to goto Cisco Live US! again this year.

Last year was such an experience, that my hopes are really high for this year as well.

I will be arriving on Friday the 8th and leaving on the 15th. Not a long stay this time, but it was what my boss could arrange for.

A couple of weeks ago I had the good fortune of attending Jeremy Filliben’s CCDE Bootcamp.

It was a great experience, which I will elaborate on in another post. But one of the technology areas I had a bit of difficult with, was GETVPN.

Wow, what a busy month this has been!

So I started my new job on February 1st and thus far, everything has been really great.

My new coworkers are very friendly and helpful.

I’ve spent the better part of february, trying to get to grips with the SP network I will be focusing on from now on. Im still not where I want to be yet, but im getting there. One of the guys I will be working very closely with, started cleaning up the network when he was hired 9 months ago and he’s done a really great job with what he’s had to work with.

This post is my follow-up on a recent discussion on twitter.

Working for a VAR (Value Added Reseller) is not always the glamours life some make it out to be.

Working as a consultant, what you are really doing, is being the CEO of your own service company.

I was fortunate enough to finally pass the CCDE written exam yesterday morning.

That begs the question of “Now What?”

Well, I will spend a couple of days putting together a study strategy, based on where I am now compared to where I need to be in order to pass the exam. As it looks now, I am probably going for a fall 2016 exam date. That gives me enough time to settle into a new job with everything that entails.

Its time for a change!

It was a tough decision, but i’ve decided that I need some new challenges in my professional life. To that effect, i’ve quit my old job and joined a different VAR/SP where I will be working in a skilled team of network engineers.

I’ve got some important news which I will reveal in the beginning of December!

So stay tuned 🙂

Why do i keep focusing so much on Cisco, when there are clearly alot of different vendors out there with similar products and technologies?

There are several reasons for this.

1. I began the professional part of my networking career with Cisco.

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People often ask me why i keep studying and when i will be “done”.

To me, this type of question seems odd, because i am committed to lifelong learning.

I am of the opinion that going through life without learning something all the time would be a life wasted. I think this goes back to the early explorers. Discovering new things, whether it be a new continent or simply a piece of knowledge really excites a certain type of people.

Even though im still in San Diego, Cisco Live! US 2015 is but a memory.

But what a memory it is! It being my first time attending a Cisco Live conference, I didn’t really know what to expect.

What I was met with, was a conference full of really sharp and nice people. The conference staff was very helpful and polite and really made an impression on me, from the time I first stepped onto the pavement outside San Diego convention center.

This blog post outlines what “MPLS VPNs over mGRE” is all about as well as provide an example of such a configuration.

So what is “MPLS VPNs over mGRE”? – Well, basically its taking regular MPLS VPN’s and using it over an IP only core network. Since VPN’s over MPLS is one of the primary drivers for implementing an MPLS network in the first place, using the same functionality over an IP-only core might be very compelling for some not willing/able to run MPLS label switching in the core.

I am preparing for the CCDE written exam, which I have coming up at CLUS.

There are so much material to go through, both to read as well as watch CL presentations, it can be a bit overwhelming at times.

This is my current schedule for the Cisco Live US 2015 event.

Most are related to my CCDE studies and a few are with technologies and products that im interested in in general.

Monday:

08:00 – 09:30 BRKSAN-2101 FCoE for small and mid size enterprises.

I will be attending this year’s Cisco Live US in San Diego!

This is my first Cisco Live, so I dont really know what to expect. There are alot of great sessions that I want to attend (if they are not already full), and I will be posting my week here when i have my sessions down.

Just wanted to let you know that Daniel from lostintransit.se is doing a webinar on network design. I will be attending and helping out any way i can.

Go here to learn more: https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/blogs/community_cafe/2015/01/21/network-design-fundamentals-webinar-with-ciscovip-daniel-dib

In this post I would like to highlight a relative new (to me) application of MPLS called Unified MPLS.

The goal of Unified MPLS is to separate your network into individual segments of IGP’s in order to keep your core network as simple as possible while still maintaining an end-to-end LSP for regular MPLS applications such as L3 VPN’s.

My apology. I have been very absent here as of late.

I have been doing some different stuff, which is irrelevant here, but rest assured, i got some posts lined up. The next one on Unified MPLS. I think you will like it, so stay tuned!  🙂

Woke up to a very nice email today.

I have been selected as a Cisco Champion for 2015! – Now i get to see what all the fuzz is about and hopefully be able to contribute something.

In this post id like to provide an example of a fairly new development to EIGRP which is called EIGRP Over The Top (OTP).

In all its simplicity it establish an EIGRP multihop adjacency using LISP as the encapsulation method for transport through the WAN network.

I am currently performing a bit of maintenance on the blog (moving host), so there might be some small errors here and there. I apologise for this! – Hopefully everything will be up and running smoothly in a few days time.

In this post i will show how and why to use a feature called IPv6 Prefix Delegation (PD).

IPv6 prefix delegation is a feature that provides the capability to delegate or hand out IPv6 prefixes to other routers without the need to hardcode these prefixes into the routers.

In this post I will be showing you how its possible to use different paths between your PE routers on a per VRF basis.

This is very useful if you have customers you want to “steer” away from your normal traffic flow between PE routers.

In this fairly short post, id like to address a topic that came up on IRC (#cciestudy @ freenode.net). Its about how you select a route thats being redistributed into an OSPF NSSA area and comes into the OSPF backbone area 0.

In this post I would like to show how its possible to use a fairly new protocol, LISP, to interconnect IPv6 islands over an IPv4 backbone/core network.

LISP stands for Locator ID Seperation Protocol. As the name suggest, its actually meant to decouple location from identity. This means it can be used for such cool things as mobility, being VM’s or a mobile data connection.

In the process of restudying EIGRP as a protocol, and more specifically as to how it converges, you can’t avoid running into the saying “Remember to bound your queries!”.

From a conceptual point of view its fairly easy to understand that the further out you ask for a prefix the longer the convergence process will take. But what really takes place when you have different tools in place to bound the query from taking place?