Category: training

Johannes Weber built a CCNP practice lab, configured 22 different protocols in it, and took packet captures of all of them happily chatting. To make things more interesting he created 45 challenges that you can solve with Wireshark using the pcap file he published.

I often get questions from engineers wondering whether my webinars or courses would be too tough for them. Here’s a question I got from an engineer who wanted to attend my Building Next-Generation Data Center course: “What specific prior experience do you expect for this workshop?”

One of my readers sent me a simple question: “Do you plan to have a Python for Networking Engineers webinar?”

Short answer: no immediate plans.

Here are just a few reasons:

Most network automation tutorials out there assume you’re running Ansible on your workstation and accessing virtual machines via SSH ports mapped by Vagrant. That’s great if you’re an experienced Ansible/Python user; for a clunky beginner like myself it’s safer to run Ansible within a VM that can be destroyed and recreated in seconds.

I got several questions along the lines of “Do I need programming skills to attend the Building Network Automation Solutions course?”

Short answer: No.

A few days after I published the blog post describing why it might make sense to attend the Building Network Automation Solutions course even when you’re already using a $vendor network management system/platform, I got a surprising email from one of my friends working for a major networking vendor:

Like with the Next-Generation Data Center course, the live sessions in the Building Network Automation Solutions course include guest speakers, Q&A discussions, and solutions to sample challenges that you’ll be able to use to complete your homework assignments.

The guest speakers for the January 2016 course include:

One of my readers wondered whether it makes sense to attend my Building Network Automation Solution course even if they plan to deploy a $Vendor platform.

It depends, this time on how fast and how far you want to proceed with network automation.

In June 2016 I got an interesting idea: let’s create a webinar series with numerous guest speakers that would describe several widely-used network automation use cases.

It took me almost half a year to get there, but finally the first session is scheduled for November 22nd.

It’s only two weeks since the last live session of the Autumn 2016 Data Center course in which Mitja Robas did a fantastic job describing a production deployment of VMware NSX on top of Cisco Nexus 9000 network, and we already have the first speakers for the Spring 2017 event:

• Scott Lowe (now at VMware) will talk about the role of open source in data center infrastructure;
• Thomas Wacker (UBS AG) will talk about their fully automated data center deployments;
• Andrew Lerner and Simon Richard (Gartner) will participate in a panel discussion on data center and networking trends.

Do you believe in vendor-supplied black box (regardless of whether you call it ACI or SDDC) or in building your own data center fabric using solid design principles?

It should be an easy choice if believe a business should control its own destiny instead of being pulled around by vendor marketing (to paraphrase Russ White)

The featured webinar in October 2016 is the Designing Active-Active and Disaster Recovery Data Centers webinar, and the featured videos include the discussion of disaster avoidance challenges and the caveats you might encounter with long-distance vMotion. All ipSpace.net subscribers can view these videos, if you’re not one of them yet start with the trial subscription.

As a trial subscriber you can also use this month's featured webinar discount to purchase the webinar.

I love listening to Scott Lowe’s Full Stack Journey podcast, so I was totally delighted when he asked me to participate. The results: FSJ Episode#8. Enjoy!

Marcel Reuter sent me a few questions about my upcoming Network Automation workshop. You might find them interesting, so here they are:

We have a lab with virtual IOS-XE, IOS-XR and Junos (vMX) router. I would like to learn how to provisioning the Lab router.

Covered in the workshop. I’m focusing on vIOS (which is pretty close to IOS Classic and IOS-XE) and Nexus OS because that’s what I can get up and running quickly in VIRL.

After the fantastic Docker 101 webinar by Matt Oswalt a few people approached me saying “that was great, but we’d need something more on Docker networking”, and during one of my frequent chats with Dinesh Dutt he mentioned that he already had the slides covering that topic.

Problem solved… and Dinesh decided to do it as a free webinar (thank you!), so all you have to do is register. Hurry up, there are only 1000 places left ;)