Hello all! How you doing? Very glad to join you, I´m taking my CCIE EI exam next December and the info and topics explanation here is helping me a lot. So thanks for it!
Salu2!
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Hola Ruben!
I am glad to hear you like our work. How is the studying going so far?
Rene
Hi Rene, how you doing? My studies well…not stopping reading a lot and labbing and before the exam I will expend my holidays month only for study.
The problem I´m having right now is as far as I go deeper in a topic It seems to me as wow, for ex. before I thought I knew about ospf and read the book ospf in deep and then I realise I had no idea hahaha.
Really I´m a little bit afraid for the design part of the exam, I don´t know anyone who passed the new exam who could tell me more or less how is that part in terms of difficulty and deep knowledge
Hi Ruben,
I am doing good. Our second son was born five weeks ago so things are hectic over here 
In the beginning, you have to deep dive into each protocol separately. Sometimes, it can seem there is no end to how much you can learn about one protocol.
Once you do full config labs, you’ll get a feeling to how much you really need to know about each protocol.
For example, OSPF is a core topic so you should be very familiar with any of the advanced topics…areas, area types, redistribution, filtering, etc. You should be able to configure anything from muscle memory. You don’t have to know about what each and every little thing in the LSDB is about. You also don’t have to know off top of your head how to configure very specific things like LSA tuning or anything like that. It’s good to have seen it once and understand it, but don’t worry about little details like this too much.
The design part is a good question. I did my CCIE in 2013 so I don’t have real life experience with the design part.
Rene
Hi, congratulations on the birth of your baby 
It´s always good news.
As you said there´s no need to go into a deeper level into everything if not this exam would be impossible, too many information about everything. You´re right doing labs I see what I can except more or less into the exam but there´s always the doubt about if they ask something more expecific as your example about LSA tuning, but this is something It always happened to me also when I studied at university lot of time ago.
About the design, well I will come back with a review when I do the exam 
For the moment, continue labbing and reading a lot.
Kind Regards.
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Hello Ruben
It turns out that a lot of these topics have a lot of depth to them, since protocols such as OSPF have been developed, improved, and added to over decades. There are many features, options, and permutations to keep in mind. I think it all comes down to doing enough labs (and a wide variety of labs) to gain experience with as many different situations as possible.
The truth is that the lab exam is probably the most nerve-wracking and difficult part of the whole experience. Just spend the time doing enough labs, and that should give you the experience you need to be successful. We’ll help you along the way here if you have any questions.
I hope this has been helpful!
Laz
Thanks, Ruben 
I think it’s important to at least have seen everything that you could encounter once. When you run into something like LSA tuning, you should know what it’s about. If you have no idea how to configure it, you can look it up if needed. The way the exam is graded is kinda unfair. If you have 15 OSPF tasks and you fail one, you get 0 points. Nothing we can do about that though…
Did you book your lab exam yet? I found that to be very helpful to make it “real”.
Rene
Thanks so much for your advice, I´m with you the lab will be nerve-cracking, I´ll try to be the most relaxed I can If i´m able to…
Wow, very unfair the grade system, if you fail one and the others are ok it doesn´t mean you know nothing about the topic but well…It´s their grading system so we only can accept it.
Yes my exam is booked for next 9th Dec. I will spend all the year holidays to have full november without work and crack my brain with labs hours and hours, family and friends are advised no beers after the exam. So let´s see what happens
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Hi Ruben,
Sounds like a good plan. In the last two months before the exam I didn’t have a life except for labbing from 10:00 to 21:00 
Knowing all the core stuff as muscle memory really makes a difference. You should be able to configure everything ASAP and then go through all the tasks again with a fine comb to triple check everything you configured. This allowed me to get rid of little errors that would have caused to get 0 points for some sections.
Rene
Hi, I´ll take note about the triple check I´m also practicing with an uk keyboard for using the same than the exam, changes a lot from the spanish one and could save me time, also I downloaded the Cisco virtual machine which will be used in the exam.
One question, any info about the coding part? I think I will be no coding from 0, maybe modify python scripts for doing some tasks, create an eeml from the scratch and using a few postam apis from SDA and SDwan.
Regards.
Hi Ruben,
If the Spanish keyboard is so much different then a US keyboard sounds like a good idea.
I think the coding part shouldn’t be too difficult. The goal is probably that you have to retrieve some information through an API. Maybe you have to modify a script. Make sure you are familiar with the SD-WAN and SD-Access APIs. If you know basic Python and tried those APIs before, I think you’ll be fine.
Rene