Today I sat or should I say, did my re-take on the Brocade Certified vRouter Engineer exam this morning. Finally I passed. I took this exam a few months ago last year and failed in a screaming heap. It was a humbling experience, thinking back then that my CCNP R&S would be enough to pass the exam. Boy I was wrong.
The materials that Brocade provided was more of a marketing brochure as suppose to a resource paper. If you have your CCNA, it would definitely be an advantage. However, you just have to watch out for Brocade specific technology such as licensing, how they perform ACL, NAT and firewall. If you have exposure to Junos, I think that will definitely be an advantage as Vyatta and Junos has that BSD foundation.
I would suggest if you plan to take the same exam in the future or if you are currently studying for it, still go through the on-line course. But I am telling you, its not complete, you have to go through other resources such as the Vyatta/Brocade websites for the PDFs.
If you have a CCNA/CCNP, focus on Vyatta’s NAT, Firewall and Licensing/upgrade stuff as the rest you can easily figure out. I have a mate who is also a CCNP R&S but failed the same exam. We both share the same thoughts on what we needed to focus on.
What’s next? We have someone from Brocade who’ll be coming over at work to give us a training. He’s claiming that he will be covering BCNE. Brocade Certified Network Engineer, which is equivalent to Cisco’s CCNA R&S. We’ll have to see what will happen if it indeed would be enough to pass the exam. It’s always nice to have another cert on your belt.
Also since I am in the topic of Brocade, I will be flying over to Sydney next week with my team lead. Will be installing a couple of Brocade 6610 ICX switches in our rack at Equinix DC. That would be interesting.
Running-Config 