CCIE DC

It’s now 4 days since the exam and my mind comes slowly to the point to accept that the journey to the CCIE DC had home to a very successful end. And what a ride has it been. From a very slow start about 12 months ago. To the first time i felt a bit confident after the INE Bootcamp in January, just to hit the bottom again a few weeks later after Cisco Live where i had attended the CCIE DC Techtorial. That was a point that made me question if there is a real chance to take the exam this year. But i took the challenge on and used all my free time to focus on the big goal. And in June i got again to the point to feel confident to pass. Then came the first exam attempt for which I already wrote a few lines. What followed to the failed attempt were around 6 weeks where i worked very hard on my weaknesses and caught up on the parts that (besides the technical issues) derailed my first attempt.

And it worked. For around 2/3 of the day i felt pretty confident that it will go well this time. At the last third i had some struggles, but still more than enough time to double check everything and still fix some mistakes that i made. I had a good feeling, but not that feeling of being sure that i had passed. So i went back to the hotel to make some notes and constantly trying to think if i had enough points to pass. I also wrote with study peers and at one point i decided to stop the thinking and just head down to the restaurant to have a nice dinner. Shortly after ordering dinner it seems someone at Cisco had compassion with my struggle (pass or fail) and got me the result in only around 2,5h after the exam! So i got the famous email with the “CCIE Lab Score Report” topic and my heart rate started getting up pretty high while i logged into the CCIE tool.

And there was it:

I did look on it for around five times till i started to believe it. I passed the Exam I was working on so hard!

So now it’s time to thank the people who helped me on my Journey to my second CCIE.

• At first my family, and here especially my spouse Silvia which always had my back and took care of our children and everything else while i studied through all the nights and weekends!
• Brian McGahan from INE for endless hours of discussions and nudges in the right direction!
• All the people on the INE CCIE Spark Groups for asking and responding to so many interesting questions!
• All the Cisco SE’s who were so kind to answer all my questions and never got mad on me! 😉
• And at last of course to all my study peers over the last year, guys you were the best peers i could have on this journey!

So, what’s next?

Well at first, Silvia is expecting our third son in a few weeks, so now it’s time to catch up on family time and then there’s a longer timeout from work to get to know our 3rd child at around the mid of September 😉

And after that? I have to recertify my VPC-NV for which i decided to take the VPC-DCV this fall. After that I think I’ll go for the VCAP-NV since I’m doing a lot of NSX stuff too, but i don’t have the time right now. And the next big goal? I can see the idea of the CCDE coming up behind some of our beautiful mountains in Austria. So stay tuned 😉