After close to a year of study and after one failed attempt I cleared it in the second attempt. Here is my experience in short and tips to prepare for the exam

 

Reading Resources 

-> Juniper Dayone – Anything and everything related to DC

-> QFX Series Book

https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/juniper-qfx5100-series/9781491949566/app03.html

-> JNCIP – ADCX/TDCX/DCX

-> Datacenter Network / EVPN – Overview

https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/evpn-in-the/9781492029045/ch04.html

 

Lab Resources 

-> If you are into any serious preparation you need to consider the below git resource, its awesome and you can practice pretty much everything even on a laptop and also in your flights/travel.

https://github.com/Juniper/vqfx10k-vagrant

You need to know a bit of vagrant and need to have VirtualBox and ansible installed, not hard by any means, all it takes is a days dedication to make your laptop ready for these, let me know if you want me to write a blog post for the setup.

-> I had Dell R810 Server, https://r2079.wordpress.com/2018/01/05/my-dc-virtual-lab-setup-insights/ , I did most of my practice on this one.

-> I also had the privilege of using hardware resources and examined the ideal configuration for a production network and learned few things from them.

-> VQFX code is not stable, and you could pretty well go ahead with using VMX code which is highly stable, some variations such as you might end up using bridge-domains vs VLANs and you need to create a VSwitch instance instead of editing under [switch-options] but worth every penny and you will end up avoiding bugs

 

Learning from my attempts and Tips

-> I was way too confident may be overly confident for the first attempt, that was the very reason for the first failed attempt to be very honest

-> I was lagging in speed and could not cope up with various tasks, the problem was not with the technology, as later in the failed score report the time which I have spent on the sections gave me a near 100% score while for the other sections I failed.

-> Data Center Interconnect killed me, there were many things going in my head by then

 

Strong points for attempt #2

 

-> Automation / ZTP and anything related to scripting was easy, I attended JAUT and also took JAUT Exam and I do scripting on a weekly basis so skimming through the code was not tough

My GitHub page – https://github.com/yukthr/auts

ZTP Blog link – https://r2079.wordpress.com/2017/09/11/ztp-with-vqfx-1k-proved-to-be-possible/

EBGP and IBGP 

https://r2079.wordpress.com/2017/10/10/ip-clos-ebgp-multipath-multiple-as/

https://r2079.wordpress.com/2017/10/08/bgp-add-path-summary/

 

-> Technology – EVPN / SP, implemented it in Junipers so was fairly confident with IP-CLOS and EVPN signaling

-> Increased speed and since I have given an attempt, I knew where to start, you need not necessarily start at section 1 and go in an orderly fashion, I completed it blockwise rather than section wise and connected all the blocks at the end, this made more sense to me

A note on automation and Security, Juniper does not expect you to be an expert at SRX or Automation, it’s not testing you for JNCIE-SEC or JAUT in the exam for sure but Juniper does expect some basic level understanding of DC Grade Automation and SRX, Dayone books should be more than enough.

Most importantly go out and enjoy the exam, its a well designed and well-articulated exam, it will challenge you at every step and its worth spending every minute inside JNCIE-DC exam center.

 

Good Luck