CCIE R&S Lab info by Maurilio Gorito - Mar-Apr 2008

After the October 2007 update from Maurilio Gorito (content manager for the CCIE R&S) which helped me a lot, here is a newer one (Mar 21, 2008) based on what happened on the recent "ASK THE EXPERT - PREPARING FOR CCIE IN ROUTING & SWITCHING" Q&A session, that might help you this time.


you can visit the lab testing facility. If you want to anticipate that you are going to visit the lab facility you can contact our support team at www.cisco.com/go/certsupport to have this arranged. Or, upon your arrival, one or two days before the exam, you can go to the reception of the lab location and ask the receptionist to contact the lab Proctor.

Some times the Proctor may not be available at the time you arrived but he or she can work with you to find a good time to give you a tour.
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The approach our CCIE Lab operations is taken is to redirect the queries that are no longer available at www.cisco.com/univercd to the current and valid web page.

Every time a page is moved our lab team creates an entry allowing the new path, so all needed documentation will be available for candidates.
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The decision of changing or replacing the 'univercd' documents is a Cisco corporate decision and they are working on it for some time now, but now we are getting to the point this is moving faster now.

This is a big transition for all of us, and at the CCIE program we are watching this transition really closely to make sure candidates you have access to all needed documentation during the exam.
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Candidates will have available online access to all needed documentation needed for the exam. During the transition of the old Doc CD we are allowing access to the Cisco websites that contain the documentation that was moved.
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The DocCD or online documentation is the reference for you to study as we base our exams on it. You don't need necessarily to master everything but be familiar walk through the documentation.
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Acrobat Reader is to be available to candidates on their desktop during the exam. If a candidate experiment difficult with that he or she must report it to the Proctor. It might be cases where the desktop went to a repair and it is not working properly. Ultimately again, it must be reported to the proctor during the exam.
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No changes on the blueprint are planned for the next 3 months. This are only rumors.

As you mentioned, any changes to the exam blueprint is announced at our website with at least 6 months in advance. If there is no announcement there, no changes planned.
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The exam is a set of questions with some requirements you will need to fulfill. When it comes to IGPs you will find scenarios involving RIP, EIGRP and OSPF and in some situations you will have border routers running more the one routing protocol.

One key point of the exam is that you need to keep in mind, at the end of the exam, is to make sure you have full connectivity through your network.

If no specific requirement or restriction is stated in the question you are free to take the approach you fell more comfortable to achieve the results.

You will not be marked down if you do not configure something that is not explicitly stated.
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The idea is to emphasize MQC, however you might see some legacy QoS as it still being used in the field.
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At the current lab environment we do not explore much on DVRMP and studying for the exam focus on basic scope as you mentioned, such as basic configuration and basic DVRMP tunnel mode.
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No, we don't cover IPv6 BGP in our exams yet. You are correct to assume that if a topic or content is not listed on the blueprint it is not tested in the exam. If we will start covering we will add it to the blueprint.
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While you have extra documentation in our online resources you will find in the written and lab exams only what you have listed on the blueprint.

So, you can assume that only topics listed on the blueprint will be in the written exam.
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Yes, it is far to say that as the CCIE R&S has as its foundation the core of the network emphasizing Switching and Routing. Anything else is built upon that.

Even though having the CCIE R&S will give you an excellent foundation towards the CCIE SP you can go straight to the CCIE SP.

The main difference between the two tracks in terms of content or topics will be: MPLS, VPN, IS-IS. These topics are not currently test on CCIE R&S lab exam. MPLS only is covered on the CCIE R&S written exam.
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Currently we have in Asia as a full time CCIE labs Beijing and Tokyo.

We are planning to start beginning in April to offer seats as full time basis are Hong Kong, Dubai and Bangalore.
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However, we have hired a full time proctor for Dubai and we expect he will be ready to be in charge of the lab still in April, if not in May.

We do really expect this situation for Dubai to be changed soon.
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At the moment we are not planning to open CCIE Lab location in Africa. However, we are studying ways to reach those locations that we do not have a physical lab, per example to have a mobile lab that we can do it. We are piloting this idea now and we are expecting to roll out it at some time yet in 2008.
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The Bangalore lab was closed because we didn't have a dedicated full time proctor to cover the lab. Now we have and starting in April we will be opening Bangalore in a regular basis. You may not seem availability for December yet as usually we open it up between 6 to 8 months in advance.
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At the moment we don't have plans to open another lab in Europe besides Brussels. We are studying ways to expand our offering for CCIE lab exams in 2008. Keep tuned at our website for news on it.
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Proctors do not touch any of the candidate’s devices during the exam. The only exception will be if a candidate thinks that something is not working because a possible failure on your rack the Proctor will very it, but the candidate will be aware of it. Proctors do not touch or play with candidate’s configuration during or after the exam.

When you start the exam your routers and switches will have an initial configuration such IP addresses, hostnames, passwords. Depending of the exam you may have more pre-configuration. The 'General Guidelines' of the exam will state what you can change and what not can be changed.

We do have a process to development each question of the exam and it is based on results. By the end of the exam Proctors use an automatic tool to save the candidate's configuration into our database and to verify some questions and do some connectivity tests like pings, verify routing tables, and so on. Then Proctors will manually verify the results and all remaining questions to come up with the final score.
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We have different exam versions and then the initial or pre-configuration will very. You don't need to very your exam initial exam when you start as it will be ready.

Managing the time during the exam is crucial. My suggestion is that you at the beginning of the exam to read the entire exam so you will know what you will have through the exam. Then a good strategy is to start working on the questions you see as easy and not to waste much time on a question. If you are having difficult skip it and come back later. Also, once you worked on a question verify if your network still working, in another word, make sure that after you have configured something new you have no broken anything else.
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Yes, it will vary from person to person, the time you have until your lab exam, how many hours you can allocate daily just to study and your level of hands-on experience.

Considering the above factors I would say after you have passed the CCIE R&S written exam and dedicating 20 to 24 hours per week having hands-on practice applying what you have learned and your experience, I believe you will be well prepared to take the lab exam in 6 months.
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I hope you have found some useful info in there ;)