Half Way There

Well, it’s done. I have successfully passed the written portion of the CCIE Voice. Now for the long and expensive, did I mention long and expensive journey toward preparing for the lab portion. My plan is to schedule my first attempt in late November/early December of this year. I think this will give me more than enough time to adequately prepare. I don’t want to rush into anything, especially since $1400 is a lot to drop per attempt.

I plan to use ipexpert’s CCIE Voice (3.0) Blended Learning Solution Self-Study Bundle. I have heard nothing but excellent reviews and praise for this program and am looking forward to diving in. I may hold off on purchasing it until the end of February since the 3.0 package will not be complete until April 2nd. Until then, I think I will be gathering SRNDs and other Cisco docs so I can brush up on all of the new features in the 7.x product line.

During this time, I am also hoping to supplement my home lab with some new hardware, including a router or 2 and some new gen phones. Hopefully eBay will be nice to me and I can find some on the cheap. I already have a server setup to run VMWare and I can get about 4 instances up at the same time (CUCM, Unity, IPCCX, CUPS). I am going to try and emulate some network devices using GNS3, but that is limiting and nothing can replace actually being able to touch the device.

 Hopefully this endeavour will be enjoyable and rewarding. I will keep posting my progress and other Cisco VoIP related material.

Until next time…