Congratulations to Chris Martin, CCIE# 34310, according to IPExpert’s Successful Candidates page.  Thanks to Windows Calculator and my non-binary math skills, that means we’ve had 5,000 new numbers since my pass back in June.  That’s not counting the repeat passes that keep the same number.  The new numbers have been skyrocketing in the last 3 months, shooting up over 2,000 since Blake Krone passed his lab at the end of October.

I’ve heard a lot of interesting theories in the past couple of weeks about why the numbers are shooting up so quickly.  Some attribute it to the official Cisco 360 training program churning out candidates left and right.  There are also those that believe there is something hinkey is going on with the numbering scheme.  Is Cisco pre-allocating numbers to each lab seat every day and then discarding them if the lab isn’t passed?  Are they counting by even numbers now?  Is the numbering now logarithmic?  Add in the recent troubles that Marc La Porte has had with Cisco and his unofficial CCIE Hall of Fame Webpage and the conspiracy theories started spreading like wildfire.  Why is Cisco trying to take down the page?  Are they trying to hide something?

After listening to all the theories and rumors and some of the more outlandish theories that I didn’t even bother to put down, I keep thinking back to a conversation that I had with Terry Slattery back at Cisco Live 2011.  Being the fanboy that I am, I had a chance to ask Terry what he thought about the CCIE numbers climbing ever so higher.  Some of the thoughts he shared with me were rather intriguing and got me to thinking about things in a light that I hadn’t really considered before.  With the acceleration of the new numbers being spit out, I think now more than ever that Terry might have been on to something.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that there isn’t anything funny going on with the numbers.  Let’s also assume that there isn’t rampant cheating going on, as some have suggested to me.  That means that we have a large number of people taking and passing the lab.  But we aren’t hearing about them.  They don’t have blogs or spend time on Groupstudy or post success stories on LinkedIn.  There isn’t any information about them out there.  Almost as if they didn’t really have a big presence on the Internet.  As if they weren’t really looking to market their skills to others and instead were either already at jobs that required the CCIE or had one lined up and ready to go.  Where would such a thing be possible?

China.

Stop and think about it for a minute.  According to Cisco, China is seeing explosive growth in networking, everything ranging from power systems to survellience.  They’re ramping up and infrastructure that’s going to need to support over a billion people all looking to get connected somehow.  China is leading the way in deploying IPv6 internally as a way to alleviate the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses.  Ask yourself then: Where are they getting all these engineers?  How many of your friends and colleagues are flying to China to work on these massive projects?  I’m guessing hardly any.  Why’s that?  Where is the supply coming from to meet this massive demand?

I believe that there are sponsored learning facilities inside China that are essentially functioning like advanced technology vocational technology centers in an effort to train a workforce to go out and assume the roles needed to build and maintain advanced networking and computing infrastructures.  That way, they don’t need to sort out all the details of arranging for a large number of visas to allow foreign engineers to come and work for months at a time.  They also don’t have to worry about bad press from said foreign engineers coming back home and discussing things like the Internet filtering policies.  Instead, they can focus on creating a highly-skilled group of workers to go out and tackle these huge projects.  Because these facilities are likely sponsored or run by the government, profit is of less concern than results.  And if you have a populace that is willing to clamor toward a job that doesn’t involve manual labor or other undesirable work, you would have a motivated pool of talent to pick from.  Taking into account the mind-bending numbers of people available for these jobs, passing even 1,000 extra CCIEs into the global pool is a blip on the radar for China.

One other thing that I’ve mentioned before lends credence to the Chinese CCIE theory in my mind.  Remember those dastardly Open Ended Questions that I hated so much?  Guess which testing facility instituted the in-person interview process that led to the OEQs before the new troubleshooting section?  That’s right, Beijing.  I’m not accusing anyone of wrongdoing.  But the fact that the OEQ program originated there means they must have had a very high pass rate they were suspect of in the first place.  What if the pass rate is still legitimately high even with the new safeguards against impropriety?  Since Cisco doesn’t release numbers on pass rate per lab, I guess we’ll never know.

Tom’s Take

At this rate, we’re looking at seeing CCIE 40,000 before the end of the year.  That’s really going to hit home for people if it took almost 3 years to go from 20,000 to 30,000 and then only takes a year to climb up to 40,000.  I don’t like to think about the idea that lab cheating is so rampant that Cisco has given up trying to protect the value of the CCIE.  Quite the contrary, I’ve heard rumors that the difficulty of the lab is as strong as ever and people are working as hard as they can to get their digits.  To me, that says there is a large contingent of people passing the lab and not talking about it, either by their own choice or the choice of someone above them.  And since we in the U.S. aren’t seeing the workforce flooded with new CCIEs daily, that must mean those passing are someone other than the U.S. (or Europe).  Add in the fact that there aren’t many network rock stars studying Mandarin or watching Ni How Kai-Lan and I am guessing that means that many of our new unknown CCIE brethren are from the Orient.  No crazy conspiracies or funny math.  Just a group of dedicated people doing their best to make it in the world.

By the time you are ready to sit in the torture chambers that house the CCIE lab, you are practiced with live configuration to the point of it being subconscious.  Configuring VLANs and routing processes happen without a second thought.  The candidate can do simple tasks quickly and spend more time focusing on difficult areas and weak points.  After walking out of the lab and waiting for the score report, tough areas are replayed over and over again trying to dissect any bright spots.  Whether or not you are confident about your results, when the unsuccessful score report arrives there is usually a shock.  Areas that the candidate believed they passed with authority show missed points and lost opportunity.  The most often heard phrase after this situation is, “I know I did better than that!”

I uttered these very words more than once.  I thought to myself, “How could I get that wrong?  I typed everything in right.  It looked like it was working.”  The fault here wasn’t only in my configuration skill.  Instead, the additional fault was in my failure to verify what I had configured.  Typing commands into a terminal for a lab configuration task is easy, relatively speaking.  It is equally important to prove that you’ve done what you think you’ve done.  Without verification, there is no way to make sure that your configuration tasks are behaving like they should.

Every time I have sat down in the lab, I take one of the two pieces of paper that you are given and I write down a number for every task in the troubleshooting and configuration sections of the lab.  When I configure something, I make a check mark next to that task.  If I can’t get it working right away, I leave it blank.  Once I have a list full of single check marks, I know it’s time to verify.  I sit down with the configuration tasks and I forget everything I’ve done up to that point.  I do this because in the past I’ve been known to say to myself, “I did that right.  No need to check it.”  That attitude couldn’t be more wrong.  If you assume that you’ve done something correctly and don’t bother to check it, you might as well have gotten the question wrong.

When I begin verifying, I read the question again and make sure there were no omitted words or phrases that could affect the configuration.  I then use a variety of “show” commands to prove that I typed everything in the right way the first time.  Nothing is taken for granted.  Neighbor statements are checked.  VLAN descriptions are checked.  Routing tables are poured over.  On lab attempts 6 & 7 (where I passed the configuration section), I found simple mistakes both times that would have cost me a large number of points.  The kind of simple mistakes that a lot of people assume that they couldn’t possibly screw up because they were so easy.  The grading script doesn’t assume you meant “neighbor 1.1.1.1 remote-as 254” instead of what you typed “neighbor 1.1.1.1 remote-as 245“.  Don’t give the script the chance to punch you out for lapses in typing skill.

Once I’ve verified a task the second time, I put a second check mark next to that task.  Once I have a page full of double checks I can relax just a little knowing that I’ve looked at every question twice.  If there’s enough time remaining before I head out, I look over the particularly hairy tasks and add perhaps a third check mark if necessary to really be sure I got them working correctly.  These are usually single tasks that stand alone in the configuration and shouldn’t have an impact on core reachability.  Screwing up your core with less than an hour to go is a great way to get high blood pressure quickly.

Tom’s Take

There’s a reason why they call it “double checking”.  I feel that having a running total of the tasks in your lab keep you focused on the macro task instead of getting bogged down in the micro sections.  It helped in my passing attempt by forcing my to keep moving in the troubleshooting section.  It always helped me in the configuration section so that I didn’t miss the forest for the trees.  Hopefully those of you out there going after your lab will find this useful.  After all, since you can’t use the paper to dispose of your gum you might as well put it to good use.

First of all, congratulations to Jonathan Topping, CCIE #30002.  He passed back on August 25th, which means that CCIE #30000 passed on the 24th or 25th.  That person is still unknown at this time, but the milestone that it represents is pretty impressive.

I chased my CCIE all the way through the 20000′s.  From reading Ethan Banks’ first blog at CCIE Candidate as he got his number (20655) all the way up until I got mine just shy of the 30k mark, I’ve been entrenched in the lore of things.  30,000 is a big mark.  Sure, CCIE #31025 will be the actual 30,000th person certified, but you can’t ignore the significance of how many people out there have chased their goal and achieved it.  Ethan passed his lab in April 2008, and with a little fudging on the math with the pass rates, it took about 3.5 years to get from 20,000 to 30,000.  Pretty impressive for what some have considered to be the hardest exam in the industry for a number of years.  The rate of passing seems to be accelerating.  It fluxuates from about 50 per week up to 150 per week depending on when the test is being taken and whether changes are rumored to be coming down the pipe soon.

There was a time I can remember people saying that anyone with a 5-digit CCIE number was just too green to be of any use in the industry.  Those same things were said just after Larry Edie passed to become #20000.  I’m sure someone will say that now that we’ve broken through 30,000 as well.  It doesn’t matter in the end though.  CCIE numbers are like grade point averages.  I was worried when I graduated college because my GPA wasn’t as outstanding as those kids that spent every waking minute studying for tests and turning in homework two weeks early.  However, on my first interview I wasn’t asked about my GPA.  They asked about my experience and what I was capable of.  The same is now true of my CCIE.  People are impressed with the certification itself, not the number.  The number only exists to prove you are who you say you are.  It doesn’t matter if you’re #1027 or #31027.  The fact is that you’ve all passed the same rigorous test to achieve your goals.  Sure, Greg Ferro may have had to study Token Ring and Ethan Banks may have had to study ATM, but we all passed a lab exam with requirements and tasks.  I’m sure that the IP tasks on my lab exam will look foreign in 3 years when we’re all running IPv6 and configuring OSPFv3.

Other vendors are starting to see the light, too.  Juniper has lab exams for its Juniper Networks Certified Internet Expert (JNCIE).  Microsoft added practical-type questions to the Server 2008 certification track a while back.  Novell took a shot at a practical exam with the first iteration of the Novell Certified Linux Engineer 1.0 exam.  I still have nightmares about that jewel.  I can see more people starting to look at practical exams at the expert level.  I know they are pain to administer and grade.  They are difficult to study for and the material has to be refreshed frequently.  However, they provide something no written multiple choice test can – experience.  I know that someone who has passed the CCIE or the JNCIE can actually sit down and do the things on the test.  There’s no multiple guessing or subject board to award a certification.  It’s down to merit, plain and simple.

Tom’s Take

CCIE #40000 will probably be certified in March 2013 if the current passing trends stay stable.  Sounds closer than one might think.  Milestones come and go, but the aptitude is always there for those that pass.  Don’t worry about getting vanity numbers like 31,024 or 31,337.  Whatever number you get will be the one 5-digit number you will never forget in your entire life.  Don’t fret over getting a number in the 30,000s.  You’re still a name after all.  The number just comes after it.

If you’d like to lookup some milestone CCIE numbers, I highly recommend Marc La Porte’s CCIE Hall of Fame.  He verifies every CCIE number, so the information there is better than anywhere else on the net.

The price of becoming an Expert just went up a little.  Effective August 1, 2011, the price of the CCIE lab is being increased by $100US across the board to be $1500.  The email that candidates received this morning:

As of August 1, 2011, the price of the CCIE Lab will change from $1400
to $1500 USD*.  Your lab fee will be processed 90 days before your
scheduled lab date. Since payment for your lab will be processed after
this date, you will incur the new price.  While you can cancel your
lab date without cost, we hope you will continue on with your
certification exam to certify that you are one of the most expert
networking professionals in the world.

As an administrative change, the timing on this is just about right.  The Cisco fiscal year begins on August 1 every year, so we are now officially in FY12.  Revenue increases usually get recognized in a new accounting period for reasons that I’ve managed to forget since my last accounting class in college.  Suffice to say that tying the lab price increase to the beginning of the fiscal year isn’t all that unheard of.

Why increase the price at all?  What am I getting for an extra 7%?  All valid questions.  Allow me to speculate:

1.  A Weak Dollar.  It’s no secret that the US dollar isn’t doing so well against other foreign currencies, like the Euro.  I’m not a Harvard Economist, so I’m not going to delve into areas that I know nothing about.  However, the price difference between the two currencies could lead Cisco to believe that the customers paying for the lab in denominations other than the US Dollar aren’t getting a fair shake.  Or, it could mean that other candidates are looking at the US labs as a bargain compared to Brussels and Dubai.  That would mean they could start booking labs here as opposed to there and start overloading the seating available here for US students.  It’s happened before, so I wouldn’t be that surprised to see it again if the candidates believed the price difference was that great.  By raising the lab to $1500, Cisco is essentially resetting the level so that everyone is fair again.

2.  Layoffs.  Yes, I know that within the next two weeks, Cisco is looking at about 6,500 layoffs from all over the company.  This includes 2,100 people who opted for an “early retirement” package in lieu of a furlough.  Why would this have an impact on the CCIE lab?  Because I have it on good authority that once of those 2,100 retirees was a CCIE proctor.  Typically, most labs run two proctors.  One shows up early to get the lab up and running for the day and run the candidates through the morning instructions.  The other proctor ends the lab and collects materials.  Depending on the time differences, the first proctor may not even be around when the lab ends.  Only having one proctor available for a site means a lot of overtime for that poor soul.  More likely is the idea that a new proctor will need to be brought on board, so increasing the price of the lab makes sense from the perspective of training a new guy in how to be mean and paying a chunk of his/her salary in an environment where pennies are going to be pinched pretty soon.

3.  Technology Refreshes.  Before any candidates out there have a heart attack, notice I said “technology” and not “blueprint”.  There is a lot of interesting technology coming in the future for the CCIE lab.  Mark Snow hinted at some of it in his Cisco Live 2011 recap post.  The plan going forward is to port all the lab workbooks to the CCIE Lab Delivery System that the R&S lab uses now.  This costs money.  Also, Cisco wants to start introducing more troubleshooting tasks in the actual configuration section now that the Open-Ended Questions have been removed.  This isn’t cheap.  In addition, Cisco is working on varying the lab tasks slightly among different versions of the exam, for instance asking a task to be configured one way on a version and the same task to have a slightly different configuration in another version.  This kind of development takes time and (you guessed it) money.  So, by adding another $100 to the lab price, they can effectively pay for the development of these new technologies without having to increase revenue from another source.  By making sure the CCIE lab can generate enough revenue to fund its own development, you never have to worry about another business unit getting involved and deciding how things are going to be run.

Tom’s Take

The CCIE lab isn’t cheap.  Not by a long shot.  Between the lab costs and the flights and the hotels and the rental cars, even one trip is a fairly costly adventure.  Adding another $100 onto that may not seem like a lot up front.  But the psychological effect can’t be understated.  The lab is now a nice round $1500 amount.  For those footing the bill themselves, this is another wallet-sized portrait of Benjamin Franklin that they have to part with.  In the end, all the pain and suffering is worth it, even that of your poor bank account.  I think the price increase will fund some great new advances in the lab and hopefully do away with the 3-ring binders for the workbooks and usher in a new age that uses technology to full advantage.  If this increase is due to currency parity, then the additional revenue that is brought in after the currency markets stabilize will be useful as well.  Just don’t expect the price of the lab to go down anytime soon, if ever.  Because if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s the cost of the CCIE lab always being a fistful of dollars.

Right before I left for Cisco Live, I had a big post about the rumored CCIE Data Center certification exam that I was going to publish.  I held off at the last second because I wanted to gather some more information at Cisco Live from the army of Cisco people that would be there.  I’m glad I waited.

Speculation has been rampant that Cisco is readying an update to the CCIE Storage Area Network (SAN) lab certification exam to better align their position with the new Unified Computing System (UCS) hardware and various other technologies like Wide-Area Application Services (WAAS) and the Application Control Engine (ACE).  These items are heavily utilized in modern datacenters to provide the best customer experience with large scale computing deployments.  Since the focus inside of Cisco for the past few months has involved UCS to a large degree, there is a lot of support in the partner community for top-tier certifications to recognize the investment that partners make in UCS training for their employees.  Also, having a program with the prestige of the CCIE attached to your data center learning gives the engineers working on the product an aura of intelligence when it comes to product.

During Cisco Live, there was even an overview of the CCIE SAN program in the breakout session BRKCCIE-1001.  Curiously, it was titled CCIE Data Center/Storage Certification.  I’m sure that people flooded into the class hoping to hear whether or not the data center CCIE would be coming out soon.  However, the majority of the class dealt with CCIE SAN and the methodologies and topologies of that exam. Only in the last few slides are any hints of the future of data center certification, and even then it is just a suggestion of updates to the existing blueprint.  What follows in this article are my ideas about what a proposed CCIE Data Center might involve.  They are based on conversations I had in the past week, but in no way represent the official position of the CCIE program or any person inside of Cisco, so don’t go quoting me as the gospel truth.

I think the CCIE Data Center program is still 12-15 months out.  Why?  Well, there is still a lot of life left in the SAN program.  The announcement of the removal of the Core Knowledge/Open Ended Questions slated for August 15th proved it.  Why bother mentioning SAN if it’s not going to be around for a while?  There are still a number of students in the CCIE SAN track today and announcing changes this soon would wreck all their hard work and study.  This is also a requirement that any major changes to a track or blueprint must be preceded by a 6-month notice.  As we haven’t heard any announcement yet, the data center CCIE couldn’t possibly arrive earlier than next January.

There is a lot of hardware that could go into a CCIE Data Center exam.  UCS, MDS, WAAS, ACE, load balancers, and even FC/FCoE storage arrays must be considered at a minimum.  What about focus?  There are lots of different areas that you could exam for track focus, from simple UCS deployments to more of a service provider, hosted cloud type integration.  How to cover all of those bases in one exam?  Especially if you have to shoehorn it all into 8 hours?  I’m pretty sure that we might end up seeing some form of tracks in the CCIE Data Center after it launches, similar to the way the CCIE Service Provider used to be subdivided.

What about all those SAN folks that busted their butts learning about MDS switches and figuring out crafty ways to configure fibre channel?  Are they going to be left out in the cold just like the old CCIE ISP Dial guys?  Relics of a bygone era?  I doubt it.  MDS switches are still on the proposed blueprints that I’ve seen being kicked around, and even the rumors say that the SAN program is being upgraded, not retired.  Don’t be shocked if the SAN guys get some kind of “bridge” program to take what they’ve learned about storage and apply it to a Data Center track.  My guess would be something like running the two tracks parallel for a few months after launch and then allowing SAN CCIEs and candidates a single free shot at the Data Center lab exam.

Tom’s Take

It’s time for Cisco to come out with a CCIE for the modern data center.  The other vendors that play in this space love to tout their expertise building multivendor networks and implementing large scale server/storage/switching deployments.  But let’s face it: they aren’t CCIEs.  Once someone gets the digits, they take on a different aura.  Having CCIEs focused on servers and storage would give Cisco a competitive advantage in the data center market, where it appears the battle for supremacy will be waged for the next couple of years.  I think Cisco is going to take their time and get this one perfect before releasing it to the public, both to be sure that it covers their goals for where they want the Cisco data center brand to go as well as to ensure they don’t alienate those CCIEs who have diligently studied SANs and taken the battle standard thus far.  Just remember to have a little patience, since the CCIE is a marathon that pays off in the end.

Okay, 24 hours after my blog post about the imminent removal of the Open Ended Questions (OEQs) from the CCIE Security Lab, I find out that I was not only right, but it is happening sooner than expected.

According to this post:

Effective August 15, 2011, CCIE Security Lab Exam and CCIE Storage Networking Lab Exam, in all global locations, will no longer include the four open-ended Core Knowledge questions.  The removal of Core Knowledge questions allow candidates to utilize the total lab time for configuration and troubleshooting. The total lab time will remain eight hours.

That pretty much puts the final nail in the coffin.  After additional research, I’ve discovered the Service Provider Operations test doesn’t include a “Core Knowledge” section, which is Cisco shorthand for the OEQs.  Along with the revelation that the SP 3.0 lab no longer includes them, this is indeed the end for CCIE Trivial Pursuit edition.

The OEQs were never really meant to do anything more than stem the tide of people “braindumping” the lab.  Rather than go through the trouble of remaking the lab every few months, they evolved the candidate interview section into a mass-produced cheat buster.  I don’t think it was as successful as Cisco would have liked, but it was really just a stop-gap measure until the statistics from the troubleshooting sections could be compiled.  Plus, they needed lead time to get the labs changed before they hemmoraged numbers well north of 30,000.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take the opportunity this weekend to enjoy the long overdue death of my least favorite section of the CCIE lab exams.  Stay tuned, though.  I’ve got some interesting CCIE news coming up after the holiday.

Just when you think things can’t get any more interesting, a little nugget of news slips out and makes your day fun.  An announcement about changes to the CCIE Security exam leaked out this morning and was quickly retracted to be polished before being reissued tomorrow or the next day.  However, Natalie Timms, the CCIE Security Program Manager confirmed in this thread that the changes were the removal of the Open Ended Questions (OEQs) and more addition of hands-on configuration.  As soon as I saw this, my wheels starting spinning.

Note: What follows is mostly conjecture based on opinions and conversations I’ve had with people in the industry.  Many of these facts are not confirmed as solid, but will be cited where appropriate.  Please don’t go telling people that my words are the gospel truth.  I don’t know any more than anyone else.

I think this movement is the beginning of the end of the OEQs.  They’ve been gone from the R&S lab for over a year now. The Voice lab has done away with them as well.  In the case of the R&S lab, they kept the new troubleshooting section in place as it served the same purpose as the OEQs, a section that could be rapidly changed to provide a method of varying the difficulty of the lab quickly.  The Voice lab introduced troubleshooting into the lab itself, either by making you diagnose broken things in your equipment or by forcing you to debug errors and do things like copy them to text files like you would if you were going to forward the files to TAC.  Integration of troubleshooting allows Cisco to have a good gauge of the candidate’s abilities and more closely ties the exam to the real world skills of a network enginee…rock star.

The remaining CCIE tracks (Wireless, Service Provider/Operations, Storage, and Security) still have OEQs attached to them.  Makes for an interesting briefing in the morning when the proctor has to give 3 different sets of instructions based on what the initial setup of your lab might look like.  Candidates hate the OEQs.  They are a trivia section at best.  People say that they are easy, CCNA-to-CCNP level questions that any CCIE candidate should be able to answer.  I find the lack of specificity in the old OEQs I took to be maddening in some cases, and the lack of proctor assistance was irritating.  In fact, the continued inclusion of OEQs on the other CCIE tracks has made them a little less appealing to me, should I find myself crazy enough to even think about attempting it all over again.

With the announcement, retraction, and eventual re-announcement of the removal of the OEQs from the Security track, I’ve got high hopes now.  I think Cisco has enough data based on their year of R&S and Voice troubleshooting to see it as a viable alternative to Trivial Pursuit: CCIE Edition.  I’ll bet that there is going to be a section similar to the Voice lab where faults are injected (or user-created) in the lab and you’ll be required to diagnose and perhaps log them in files on the desktop.  This makes the most sense, as some of the hardware can be emulated like the IOU images that run in the troubleshooting section but emulation of the specific ASICs and software on something like an ASA would be problematic at best.  By adding troubleshooting, the Security lab will start feeling more like a real-world scenario.

The Wireless track is due for a revamp in November.  Don’t be shocked to see the OEQs get stripped from it as well.  Wireless is a hard track with all the specific hardware required and would also lend itself well to a Voice-style troubleshooting inside the lab exam.  The CCIE Storage exam is on its last legs and is most likely about to be replaced by a new CCIE track more focused around Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS), along with Nexus switching, Wide-Area Application Services (WAAS) as well as Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) storage that will require the MDS switches from the old Storage lab.  This CCIE Data Center track (if that’s what it ends up being called) is probably one of the worst-kept ‘secrets’ in the CCIE world, as I’ve had several people mention to me, and a couple of candidates even ask the proctors when the lab would be retooled to include it.  In the interest of complete fairness, the proctor’s comment was “No comment.”

That leaves Service Provider and Service Provider Operations left as the only OEQ-enabled labs here.  I doubt that Cisco will leave the OEQs here if it removes them from other tracks.  The SP lab recently received a refresh and the SPO lab is very new.  I think that there will be an announcement very similar to the Security lab that removes the OEQs, but I think rather than injecting faults in this lab, they may try for a troubleshooting section down the road similar to the R&S lab.  This could be accomplished with the IOU images that are in use now for the R&S TS section.  Addition of the IOS-XR content would require something different, perhaps the mythical “Titanium” emulator for XR that I keep hearing about yet have never seen (much like IOU only a few months ago).  The addition of a real TS section would change the content drastically though, so it would require 6 months notice before being implemented.  In that time, however, they could use an in-lab troubleshooting method just like the other tracks.

——————————————————————————————————————–

*EDIT*

Thanks to Youssef El Fathi for pointing out that the SP lab has not had OEQs since the 3.0 revision early in 2011.  The thread confirming this from June 8th is HERE.  If that truly is the case, then I don’t see any reason why there should continue to be OEQs in any other tracks.

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Tom’s Take

There you have it.  A road map for eliminating the OEQs and banishing them to the same circle of hell as ARCNet and MicroChannel buses.  While I can’t confirm any of my suspicions outside the semi-firm announcement of the removal of OEQs from the Security exam, it makes the most sense that Cisco is ready to implement this change track-wide in the lab.  OEQs take a lot of time to grade and are slightly subjective.  Troubleshooting is pretty easy in comparison – it either works or it doesn’t.  By standardizing on troubleshooting instead of OEQs as the preferred rapid-change method of candidate testing, it makes things a little more fair all around.  I plan on finding the CCIE program managers when I go to Cisco Live this year and asking them about upcoming changes to the tracks so that I can nail down what might be happening.  If they tell me that the OEQs really are going away please don’t mistake my tears for sorrow.  They’ll be tears of unadulterated joy.

I’m going to say it again to avoid an international incident: This is all conjecture at this point.  If I turn out to be wrong, so be it.  However, I feel the time of the OEQs is over.  Don’t tell everyone on Groupstudy or or OSL that this is the absolute truth until you get a confirmed press release from someone whose name ends in “@cisco.com”.