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Cisco posted an announcement today on the CCDE page of the Cisco Learning Network.

REGISTER NOW for the BETA Practical Exam
Cisco is now registering beta candidates for the CCDE Practical Exam. Cisco has finished development of the second exam needed to attain the CCDE certification, the practical exam, and is now soliciting candidates for the beta delivery.

Cisco will be offering this beta delivery of the exam on October, 1 in Chicago, Illinois at a VUE professional testing center. Only candidates that have a passing score on the CCDE qualification exam may register and participate in this exam. Exam beta pricing is $980US. Register Now by email at: ccdebeta@cisco.com

Luckily for me I live in Chicago so it won't be too far of a trek. :) If the written exam is any indication of the content that will be tested on in the practical exam, it's sure to be an interesting one. The good news is that I have just under three months to finish reading the few hundred thousand pages of Solutions Reference Network Design guides.

Also as a side note the Chicago Cubs are still in first place in the National League! If you are going to be in town for the CCDE beta shoot me an email. Maybe we can arrange an Internetwork Expert sponsored field trip to playoff baseball at Wrigley Field! ;)

What you guys used for written? I want to get done with it quickly and sign up for lab in Oct.

 

thanks,

Written? :) hmm, personally i took the beta test last year and didn't use anything for preparitons, just went stright for the exam. However, I passed CCIE SP, Security and R&S in the year before so that was my practice :) The exam is pretty much about routing, network security and SP tehnologies, so it's basically L3 networks design. You need to know Enterprise/SP QoS foundations also and that's it :) As for the reading, i would recommend to go over Doyle books, paying attention to Vol 1. The another good thing is Cisco Press "End-to-End QoS Network Design" and definitely "Optimal Routing Design" by Russ White and others. Also "IPsec Virtual Private Network Fundamentals" and "MPLS Enabled Applications" as well as "MPLS VPN Architectures", "Layer 2 VPN Architectures" and "Traffic Engineering with MPLS". Wow.. I know that's too much for quick reading :( I spend a year reading all those books during my CCIE preparations. But then again you can skim over, skipping the part already familiar to you. -- Petr Lapukhov, CCIE #16379 (R&S/Security/SP/Voice) petr@internetworkexpert.com InternetworkExpert, Inc. http://www.internetworkexpert.com >----- Original Message ----- Subject: Re: [CCDE] CCDE Beta Practical Registration Now Available From: "Zeus" Date: Fri, July 11, 2008 1:21 What you guys used for written? I want to get done with it quickly and sign up for lab in Oct.   thanks,Internetwork Expert - The Industry Leader in CCIE Preparation http://www.internetworkexpert.com Subscription information may be found at: http://www.ieoc.com/forums/ForumSubscriptions.aspx

Like Petr said the scope of the exam is very large.  Unlike CCIE however there are no questions on configurations or packet level formats.  Instead the exam focuses more on questions like "customer has XYZ requirements, what is the most appropriate solution."  Lots of enterprise and service provider routing design are included as well, such as "given the shown OSPF/EIGRP network, how can LSA flooding/query scope be reduced", or "router X receives a packet for destination A; what does it do with this and why", or "BGP router X receives prefix A; what path selection does it choose, who does it advertise the route to, and why."

In my opinion it was the most well written Cisco prometric/vue exam that I've taken.  If you understand the "why" of networking, then the exam should be fairly straightforward.  As for the practical exam, I'll let you all know on Oct 2nd ;)


Petr Lapukhov wrote:

Written? :) hmm, personally i took the beta test last year and didn't use anything for preparitons, just went stright for the exam. However, I passed CCIE SP, Security and R&S in the year before so that was my practice :) The exam is pretty much about routing, network security and SP tehnologies, so it's basically L3 networks design. You need to know Enterprise/SP QoS foundations also and that's it :) As for the reading, i would recommend to go over Doyle books, paying attention to Vol 1. The another good thing is Cisco Press "End-to-End QoS Network Design" and definitely "Optimal Routing Design" by Russ White and others. Also "IPsec Virtual Private Network Fundamentals" and "MPLS Enabled Applications" as well as "MPLS VPN Architectures", "Layer 2 VPN Architectures" and "Traffic Engineering with MPLS". Wow.. I know that's too much for quick reading :( I spend a year reading all those books during my CCIE preparations. But then again you can skim over, skipping the part already familiar to you. -- Petr Lapukhov, CCIE #16379 (R&S/Security/SP/Voice) petr@internetworkexpert.com InternetworkExpert, Inc. http://www.internetworkexpert.com >----- Original Message ----- Subject: Re: [CCDE] CCDE Beta Practical Registration Now Available From: "Zeus" Date: Fri, July 11, 2008 1:21 What you guys used for written? I want to get done with it quickly and sign up for lab in Oct.   thanks,Internetwork Expert - The Industry Leader in CCIE Preparation http://www.internetworkexpert.com Subscription information may be found at: http://www.ieoc.com/forums/ForumSubscriptions.aspx


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Thank you for the update Petr!