Practical OTV ————- This post is all about OTV (Overlay Transport Virtualization) on the CSR1000v. I wanted to create the post because there are alot of acronyms and terminology involved. A secondary objective was to have a “real” multicast network in the middle, as the examples I have seen around the web, have used a direct P2P network for the DCI.

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.

For a while now, the concept of EVC’s (Ethernet Virtual Circuits) and EFP’s (Ethernet Flow Points), has eluded me. In this short post, i will provide you with a simple example of a couple of EFP’s. In a later post i will discuss the MEF concept of EVC’s.

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.

In this post, I will put together a variety of different technologies involved in a real-life DMVPN deployment. This includes things such as the correct tunnel configuration, routing-configuration using BGP as the protocol of choice, as well as NAT toward an upstream provider and front-door VRF’s in order to implement a default-route on both the Hub and the Spokes and last, but not least a newer feature, namely Per-Tunnel QoS using NHRP.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have decided to change my focus quite a bit. I was planning on tackling the IOS-XR exam this year and was preparing for it by going through the blueprint. However another track kept pulling me towards it, and ofcourse thats the CCDE track.