When will the new blueprint be announced? In three days!

If you ask me, there is a 99% of chance that it will be in couple of days on Cisco Live US June 23-27 this year.

WHAT?

Version 4 did run virtualized IOU (IOS on Unix) for the troubleshooting section of the exam. In the v5 there will probably be the whole exam with virtualized routers. I this way you can only hope to get 6 routers topology. It will more likely be some 20 or so devices in the lab. Switching part of the story. I don’t know what to say. I do hope that there will be some real gear there. Hopefully some 3850 switches that are Cisco switches to be deployed in the future.

Holly IOS

12.4(15)T on the routers, 12.2(46)SE on switches is so old. It’s like running Windows 3.1 I would expect to see 15.2 on routers, and 15.0 on switches.

Okay, so what’s different really

Rumors I’ve heard include:

  • Frame Relay is going out
  • PfR, a lot of it I think
  • IPv6 everywhere and in more details.
  • No more RIPv2

Question Styles/Exam Layout

Everything will now be like the Troubleshooting section and troubleshooting should stay as it is. This part is intentionally made so that it test how you manage to work under time pressure.

What to do now?

Nothing, labs labs labs. There is nothing that can be done to pass this sort of lab exam except to know as many as you can learn from networking. This is why CCIE is so reputable. Because if you have it, it means that you know something. If you did bought some study materials, perhaps like me from INE, they will give you new materials with updates when they make the changes but the current versions have almost all you need and a lot to learn until you wait those updates.