Juniper JNCIE-ENT Network Expert Certification History
Today I received the result of taking the Juniper Networks Certified Expert Enterprise Routing and Switching 8-hour laboratory exam. The bottom line is JNCIE-ENT # 427.
The exam is the final step of certification of the network specialist Juniper Networks in the direction of "Enterprise". In fact, the exam is analogous to the more popular CCIE R & S from Cisco Systems.
Hot on the heels I want to share my experience and impressions about the exam itself, the Juniper Networks certification process.
Comparing alternative Cisco vendors of network equipment, my choice fell on Juniper Networks. Juniper is one of Cisco's key competitors, but at the same time it has a more specialized portfolio of solutions - routing, switching and security for telecommunications networks of a carrier and corporate class, wireless networks. The company does not have voice solutions, its own optical transport, DWDM, and obsolete SDH / PDH, but there is an accurate idea of ​​the future of telecommunication networks. Juniper was one of the first who formulated his concept of SDN (Sofware Defined Networking) and began to demonstrate its elements.
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The basic course is JNCIA-Junos (Juniper Networks Certified Associate Junos), which is a single requirement for all areas. Unlike Cisco CCNA, there is no explicit specialization and it focuses on the features of the Junos operating system, which, without going into details, is practically the same for all major switching and routing platforms.
At the second level of certification, specialization appears in accordance with the direction of training - JNCIS-ENT / SP / SEC (Juniper Networks Certified Specialist). Comparing with Cisco, CCNP is not so large and to obtain a certificate, it is enough to pass one exam against three from Cisco.
A separate advantage for me was the availability of free official training materials for independently preparing for the JNCIA-Junos and JNCIS-ENT / SP / SEC exams, which are available in the “Fast Track Program” section of juniper.net.
The third level of certification is the last stage of the theoretical exams - JNCIP-ENT / SP / SEC (Juniper Networks Certified Professional). In addition to theoretical questions, previous versions of certification exams contained laboratory work; now everything is simpler — only theory. Returning to the parallel with Cisco, the exam reflects the amount of CCIE written knowledge, but for which a separate certificate is required.
The exams themselves consist of 70 questions with 3-5 answers, all given about one and a half hours.
I don’t hide that I used dumps to simplify the exams, but either I’m so unlucky or Juniper updates them so often, I only got 3-5 questions out of 70 from the dumps - statistics for 5 exams. Therefore, as usual, it was necessary to think and there was very little time.
Unlike Cisco CCIE, which requires only CCIE written, Juniper JNCIE certification requires the presence of current certificates of all previous levels of theoretical exams.
All the details can be viewed in the Juniper Networks Certification Program (JNCP) section .
As mentioned earlier, JNCIE-ENT has practically no communities, all attempts to find real examples, tasks and dumps were in vain, which caused even more interest in this task.
Collecting information was obtained according to the principle “from the world by thread”; a Russian-speaking certified specialist with the “Enterprise” direction, until the exam itself, could not be found with which one could discuss in detail all the details of the exam.
During the search, three main sources were found:
During the period of my training, it was only possible to attend internship in Sunnyvale (California) or in Amsterdam, which was not available to me.
This year the opportunity to take this course in person in Russia or remotely (Instructor Led Online) without leaving home.
So, after studying the reviews, the bid was made on a workbook from iNetZero, which was immediately acquired.
The JunOS operating system of Juniper routers and switches is perfectly virtualized on x86 processors, you can find ready-made assemblies “olive” on the network. But not everything is as smooth as we would like. The image lacked the most important element - the basic network interfaces such as ge - * / * / *, only the em * management interface, which was significantly limited in functionality. Olive was immediately swept away three days after being reviewed. But the idea and the hope of virtualizing the booth did not disappear.
Juniper plans to launch the SRX-Firefly virtual router-firewall, an image of the beta version of which was kindly provided by colleagues from Juniper. This Junos image contains a virtual FPC that solves the interface problem, but the main principle of this product is only routing and firewalling, switching is completely absent, unlike hardware SRX - family ethernet-switching was not applied at the interface configuration level.
Therefore, it was decided and in various ways (bought on ebay, avito, rented, etc) the following equipment was assembled for home labs:
Thanks to the Poplar training center in the person of Leonid Mirenkov, I had the opportunity to pass this exam in Moscow. As the saying goes, home and home walls help, I didn’t even hope to pass this exam the first time. Before that, I was already set up to pass the exam in Amsterdam - the exam was paid for and booked the Radisson Hotel within walking distance from the Juniper office. And it was also possible to do this, for example, in Cairo or Dubai, combining business with pleasure.
No matter where the exam is taken, the racks with laboratory equipment are located in Sunnyvale (California, USA), the training center only provides remote access via SSL VPN and the SecureCRT console. This feature led to unpleasant delays in the response of the console, so the use of keyboard shortcuts, notepad and the junos commands “load patch” and “load merge relative terminal” when configuring devices was simply inevitable.
Accompanied by an exam English-speaking Proctor from the company Juniper - Ayman Abrobh. He was extremely friendly with us (there were only two of us), he answered all the questions that related to the wording of tasks, equipment operation, regulations and other organizational issues, of course, excluding tips and hints on solving problems.
According to the rules of the exam, you cannot use static routes to bypass idle dynamic routing processes; for each static route, one point is subtracted. The first horror struck me when I discovered the static 127.1.1.0 reject route on all routers in the initial configuration. This turned out to be not a setup, but a feature (or a bug?) Junos 11.4, the essence of which was the impossibility of committing the configuration with pim local rp without this route.
The second time on the exam, I was panicked when I lost remote control to the switches, when I had to recompile the virtual chassis. It turned out in vain, because if a hardware failure is detected, then you need to report this to the proctor as soon as possible so that he can stop the timer and transfer the lab to the backup rack. In my case, everything was restored in normal mode after 2 minutes.
I will not disclose the essence of the tasks for obvious reasons, but I can definitely say that almost all the stated topics on the official website are present at the exam.
I guess that there are several options for assignments.
Also published information about the beta testing of the new version of the exam .
With great pleasure I will try to answer any questions you may have.
In conclusion, I express my gratitude to my spouse Yulia for endless understanding and patience!
The exam is the final step of certification of the network specialist Juniper Networks in the direction of "Enterprise". In fact, the exam is analogous to the more popular CCIE R & S from Cisco Systems.
Hot on the heels I want to share my experience and impressions about the exam itself, the Juniper Networks certification process.
Why Juniper, not Cisco?
At one time, I was fortunate enough to work as an instructor at the Cisco Network Academy on the CCNA course, and as a result I got the impression that there are too many Cisco specialists in the telecommunications market, for example, only CCIE experts are already more than 41,000. There are both positive and negative aspects to this. The positive communities include excellent communities, not only English-speaking, but also Russian-speaking, a huge number of training centers in various cities, the presence of support and “visiting labs” - the opportunity to pass a laboratory exam in Russia in some areas. The disadvantages include the discredit of the expert exam by the presence of always fresh “dumps” and, as a result, the general tendency to reduce the value of CCIE with an increase in the number of certified specialists.Comparing alternative Cisco vendors of network equipment, my choice fell on Juniper Networks. Juniper is one of Cisco's key competitors, but at the same time it has a more specialized portfolio of solutions - routing, switching and security for telecommunications networks of a carrier and corporate class, wireless networks. The company does not have voice solutions, its own optical transport, DWDM, and obsolete SDH / PDH, but there is an accurate idea of ​​the future of telecommunication networks. Juniper was one of the first who formulated his concept of SDN (Sofware Defined Networking) and began to demonstrate its elements.
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Certification path
Juniper certification includes three main areas:- Enterprise Routing and Switching (ENT) - routing and switching for corporate networks;
- Service Provider Routing and Switching (SP) - routing and switching for carrier networks;
- Security (SEC) - packet network security.
First level "Associate"
The basic course is JNCIA-Junos (Juniper Networks Certified Associate Junos), which is a single requirement for all areas. Unlike Cisco CCNA, there is no explicit specialization and it focuses on the features of the Junos operating system, which, without going into details, is practically the same for all major switching and routing platforms.Second level "Specialist"
At the second level of certification, specialization appears in accordance with the direction of training - JNCIS-ENT / SP / SEC (Juniper Networks Certified Specialist). Comparing with Cisco, CCNP is not so large and to obtain a certificate, it is enough to pass one exam against three from Cisco.A separate advantage for me was the availability of free official training materials for independently preparing for the JNCIA-Junos and JNCIS-ENT / SP / SEC exams, which are available in the “Fast Track Program” section of juniper.net.
The third level is "Professional"
The third level of certification is the last stage of the theoretical exams - JNCIP-ENT / SP / SEC (Juniper Networks Certified Professional). In addition to theoretical questions, previous versions of certification exams contained laboratory work; now everything is simpler — only theory. Returning to the parallel with Cisco, the exam reflects the amount of CCIE written knowledge, but for which a separate certificate is required.Theoretical exams
All theoretical exams (Associate, Specialist, Professional) are taken in Pearson VUE test centers. From my own experience, as soon as there is a feeling of readiness for the exam, through the VUE website I choose a test center that is convenient for me (for example, there are more than a dozen in Moscow only) according to the criteria of territorial location and availability at convenient times. I do it in about a day or even less, which is not recommended, but it works fine. I also pay via the VUE website with a bank card, which is much more profitable compared to paying an exam on the spot at the test center. It is necessary to understand that educational centers, on the basis of which Pearson VUE test centers are located, are not particularly welcome.The exams themselves consist of 70 questions with 3-5 answers, all given about one and a half hours.
I don’t hide that I used dumps to simplify the exams, but either I’m so unlucky or Juniper updates them so often, I only got 3-5 questions out of 70 from the dumps - statistics for 5 exams. Therefore, as usual, it was necessary to think and there was very little time.
Level 4 "Expert"
JNCIE (Juniper Networks Certified Expert) certification is final for the chosen direction, in my case JNCIE-ENT, you can only grow further in another direction, for example, Service Provider, which is the most popular among Juniper.Unlike Cisco CCIE, which requires only CCIE written, Juniper JNCIE certification requires the presence of current certificates of all previous levels of theoretical exams.
Additional direction "Support"
It is necessary to mention that for each of the main directions there is a branch on network support (Support Tracks). A prerequisite for obtaining a Juniper Networks Certified Network Support Professional (JNCSP) certification is the availability of an appropriate JNCIP (Professional).All the details can be viewed in the Juniper Networks Certification Program (JNCP) section .
JNCIE-ENT exam preparation
It took me about 2 years to complete the whole cycle of acquaintance with equipment and the study of Juniper technologies: I received my first JNCIA-Junos certificate on March 7, 2012, and I passed JNCIE-ENT on December 20, 2013.As mentioned earlier, JNCIE-ENT has practically no communities, all attempts to find real examples, tasks and dumps were in vain, which caused even more interest in this task.
Collecting information was obtained according to the principle “from the world by thread”; a Russian-speaking certified specialist with the “Enterprise” direction, until the exam itself, could not be found with which one could discuss in detail all the details of the exam.
Information sources
The most useful forum was the official forums.juniper.net .During the search, three main sources were found:
- JNCIE Enterprise Bootcamp , price $ 3,500
- iNetZero JNCIE-ENT workbook , price - € 445.00
- Proteus Press JNCIE-ENT Workbook , Price - $ 500
During the period of my training, it was only possible to attend internship in Sunnyvale (California) or in Amsterdam, which was not available to me.
This year the opportunity to take this course in person in Russia or remotely (Instructor Led Online) without leaving home.
So, after studying the reviews, the bid was made on a workbook from iNetZero, which was immediately acquired.
Home laboratory
The next step was the need to create a stand at which one could constantly train. The equipment rental was immediately flagged due to the lack of decent offers, the only exception is the iNetZero service, which provides 8 hours sessions for extremely inconvenient periods and was always booked by someone.The JunOS operating system of Juniper routers and switches is perfectly virtualized on x86 processors, you can find ready-made assemblies “olive” on the network. But not everything is as smooth as we would like. The image lacked the most important element - the basic network interfaces such as ge - * / * / *, only the em * management interface, which was significantly limited in functionality. Olive was immediately swept away three days after being reviewed. But the idea and the hope of virtualizing the booth did not disappear.
Juniper plans to launch the SRX-Firefly virtual router-firewall, an image of the beta version of which was kindly provided by colleagues from Juniper. This Junos image contains a virtual FPC that solves the interface problem, but the main principle of this product is only routing and firewalling, switching is completely absent, unlike hardware SRX - family ethernet-switching was not applied at the interface configuration level.
Therefore, it was decided and in various ways (bought on ebay, avito, rented, etc) the following equipment was assembled for home labs:
- EX4200 switches - 4 pieces, the key role of which is the study of the virtual chassis and other switching functionality;
- J2320 routers - 2 pcs. - the equipment has already been discontinued, but the functionality completely covered the preparation tasks;
- SRX100 routers - 2 pcs., SRX210 - 2 pcs., SRX240 - 1 pc .;
- two laptops on which 4 virtual SRXs were included.
Laboratory exam
The JNCIE-ENT exam is a laboratory test, it takes 8 hours to complete, the lunch time is not included, the price is $ 980, if paid through the JNCP Lab Exam Scheduling website. The main idea of ​​the exam is to present one day in the life of a network administrator and solve a number of tasks assigned to him in one working day.Thanks to the Poplar training center in the person of Leonid Mirenkov, I had the opportunity to pass this exam in Moscow. As the saying goes, home and home walls help, I didn’t even hope to pass this exam the first time. Before that, I was already set up to pass the exam in Amsterdam - the exam was paid for and booked the Radisson Hotel within walking distance from the Juniper office. And it was also possible to do this, for example, in Cairo or Dubai, combining business with pleasure.
No matter where the exam is taken, the racks with laboratory equipment are located in Sunnyvale (California, USA), the training center only provides remote access via SSL VPN and the SecureCRT console. This feature led to unpleasant delays in the response of the console, so the use of keyboard shortcuts, notepad and the junos commands “load patch” and “load merge relative terminal” when configuring devices was simply inevitable.
Accompanied by an exam English-speaking Proctor from the company Juniper - Ayman Abrobh. He was extremely friendly with us (there were only two of us), he answered all the questions that related to the wording of tasks, equipment operation, regulations and other organizational issues, of course, excluding tips and hints on solving problems.
Composition of tasks
The tasks are divided into 8 sections: interfaces, switching, IGP routing, BGP, protocol-independent routing (ipv4, ipv6), multicast, QoS, system services and security. Each section contains from 3 to 9 tasks, each task is estimated from 1 to 4 points, in total - 100 points. The passing score is 71. At the same time, if there is not at least one correctly solved task in one of the sections, the exam is failed. The tasks themselves are interrelated and resemble a snowball, for example, without solving the QinQ problem in switching, it is impossible to make OSPF connectivity without doing the correct OSFP redistribution, Multicast will not work and the tunnel interface will not rise.According to the rules of the exam, you cannot use static routes to bypass idle dynamic routing processes; for each static route, one point is subtracted. The first horror struck me when I discovered the static 127.1.1.0 reject route on all routers in the initial configuration. This turned out to be not a setup, but a feature (or a bug?) Junos 11.4, the essence of which was the impossibility of committing the configuration with pim local rp without this route.
The second time on the exam, I was panicked when I lost remote control to the switches, when I had to recompile the virtual chassis. It turned out in vain, because if a hardware failure is detected, then you need to report this to the proctor as soon as possible so that he can stop the timer and transfer the lab to the backup rack. In my case, everything was restored in normal mode after 2 minutes.
I will not disclose the essence of the tasks for obvious reasons, but I can definitely say that almost all the stated topics on the official website are present at the exam.
I guess that there are several options for assignments.
Also published information about the beta testing of the new version of the exam .
Conclusion
The most unpleasant thing in the whole procedure is waiting for the exam results. Unlike a few hours of Cisco CCIE, for Juniper JNCIE, according to the rules, the result is announced within 15 business days.With great pleasure I will try to answer any questions you may have.
In conclusion, I express my gratitude to my spouse Yulia for endless understanding and patience!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/208708/
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