The final step in earning your CCIE is the hands-on, eight-hour exam. (in case you missed our previous article on preparing for a long exam, click here) Getting in the mindset of taking a 8 hour exam can be difficult, and this is why preparing for such a task is very important. It’s not only the time it takes, but also the cost. At $1,400 per attempt along with the cost of travel and lodging it can be very expensive to fail the exam.

The gradedlabs|INE mock lab exam is designed to be a simulation of the actual Cisco CCIE Lab Exam. That is the racks are pre-configured to simulate different network situations. The type and difficulty of these simulations are based on which mock lab you decide to take. Currently there are seven unique mock lab simulations.

The first step into taking a mock lab exam is to purchase 129 tokens or the product here. If you are not familiar with how gradedlabs tokens work, have a look at our article on the definitive guide to gradedlabs tokens here. After you have purchased enough tokens to take Mock Lab, you will need to login to your gradedlabs.com members account.

On the dashboard of your gradedlabs.com members account you can scroll down and see your overall token balance. Following the token balance (1) are the link (2) for scheduling your CCIE Routing & Switching Mock Lab. The next step is to click CCIE Routing & Switching Mock Lab. This will open a new window where we can then schedule our mock lab.

Now we are able to schedule our mock lab exam. Remember that a mock lab exam is 8 hours with enough time for a 30 minute break (to simulate the 30 minute lunch break given by the actual exam). This means you will have a total of 8 hours and 30 minutes to complete the exam. When scheduling, this means that if you schedule for S1 on any date your racks will be booked out for S1 and S2. To schedule your mock labs simply click the desired date and time slot you wish to take your exam (1), check the token balance to make sure that 129 tokens have been spent and then click schedule. If you schedule your exam within 72 of the start of your session you will not be able to reschedule it. However, you are able to reschedule at any time up until 72 hours before your exam.

Note: We know that things come up and sometimes it is impossible to make your session. If you are within the 72 hour window and would like to cancel your mock lab exam please contact gradedlabs customer service and we will assist you in rescheduling at no additional costs.

When booking rack rentals or mock labs, be sure to double check the time that you are renting. S1 starts at 3:00 AM Pacific Time, S2 starts at 9:00 AM Pacific time, S3 : 3:00 PM Pacific Time, & S4: 9:00 PM Pacific time. Also, be sure to double check the session that you wanted to rent in the box on the left. For example the mock lab shown above will start at 3:00 AM (Pacific Time) on August 27, 2009.

After you click schedule, you will receive your rack rental results. For mock labs, this will show that we have been scheduled 2 sessions starting at S1 on the 27 of August.

The functionality now, for the time being, is on INE’s members site. The next step is to verify that your session is displaying with in your INE’s member account. To do this, login to your members account or if you logged into your gradedlabs.com account you should already be logged into your members account. Next, click the tab marked “Mock Labs & Assessments”. The Assessments portion of this link are based on the Poly-Lab Assessment. For more information on the Poly-Lab Assessment, click here.

Perhaps the most difficult decision in this process is deciding which Mock Lab to take. You have the ability to select which lab you would like to take as well as previewing each lab along with the labs difficulty. The difficulty rating of the mock lab ranges from 6 to 10. We have placed the actual CCIE Lab Exam on this scale at a 7. A short snapshot is below for each exam.

Click here, for the points breakdown.

Click here, for the points breakdown.

Click here, for the points breakdown.

Click here, for the points breakdown.

Click here, for the points breakdown.

Click here, for the points breakdown.

Click here, for the points breakdown.

This is a question that we get from time to time, and it’s really impossible for us to answer. If you are unsure about where you are on the overall scale from 0 – 10, then there are few things you can do. We do offer the poly-lab assessment which is a lower investment to the mock lab and depending upon your settings can be much shorter as well. This will give you a better target at where you currently are in your studies. This will also show you the areas where you need more work, and you can take learning capsules in this technology to become better familiar with it. Then you can look at the points breakdown for each lab and take the lab which emphasizes in this area to ensure that you have learned that technology.

To see our section of learning capsules click here.
To learn more about the poly-lab assessment click here.

One hour prior to the start of your lab time, you will receive the login for the rack and the actual mock lab exam, the logical topology, the physical topology, and the initial configs. This is a series of tasks that must be completed within the 8 hours and 30 minutes allocated. At the start of your session you will need to login to your INE members account and click start on the lab you have previously set. This will start a 8.5 hour timer that will countdown. When the timer expires your configs will be saved and you will be removed from the rack.

After you finish your lab it is then graded by a CCIE professional. Unlike the poly-lab assessment, this process is not automatic, but rather is done by hand. It usually takes the grader around 2 business days to complete the grading for the mock labs. Click here for a example score report. Passing is getting a score greater than or equal to 80 points.

Taking the actual CCIE Lab Exam is expensive and time consuming. It is difficult to judge how ready you are to take and pass the exam. Tools like the Routing & Switching Mock Lab Exam and the Poly-Lab Assessment were developed for this purpose, to judge your readiness. It is much cheaper and a better learning experience to find out before taking the actual exam that you are not ready. We recommend that if you score below 80 on any exam with a difficulty of 7 then you should take more steps to prepare. This would be doing targeted learning capsules in the area that you did poorly in or continuing doing other workbook tasks from INE. If you score below 80 on mock labs with a difficulty of 6 then you should focus your studying and repeat the mock lab exam with a difficulty of 7.

If you scored greater than 80 on any mock lab with a difficulty of 7 or greater, then congratulations. You are in good shape for the actual CCIE Lab Exam. We would suggest one more attempt at a mock lab 2 weeks prior to your actual lab exam. This way you can brush up on your timing and troubleshooting skills. Click here to view the product page, and for a limited time check-out with discount code AMIREADY to get your mock lab for just $99. That is a unbeatable price for this great product. The material for this mock lab exam is from the author’s at Internetwork Expert (INE).

The written exam to get Cisco certification is a long test that covers a wide assortment of possible questions. With over nine categories that you need to be well versed in, it can be hard to know where to start when you a preparing to take the exam. There will be a lot of reading materials, although depending on how long you have worked in your field you might have learned a lot just through experience. Still, you’ll need to do some serious studying to make sure you get a good score on the exam.

You’ll want to start with looking at the blueprints for the test. These blueprints can be found through the Cisco website and you can print them out to get an idea of what will be on the CCIE written test. Of course it seems like they left nothing off this long list of possible subjects, but keep in mind that absolutely anything relative to the exam can be included even if it isn’t on the blueprints. They are a good place to start to figure out what kind of reading you should be doing and what subjects you should brush up on if you aren’t familiar with them.i

Depending on what division of Cisco you are currently working for, you may have to do more studying than other groups. Don’t let the amount of studying for 100 questions get you down, because there is more to the CCIE than just the written part. By doing studying on every area you don’t know much about you will also be preparing yourself for the other portions of the exam, especially the lab part which plays a huge role in your overall test score.

Cisco actually makes a good portion of the reading materials that you will want to familiarize yourself with, so be sure to pick up some of their books. Of course they do publish a lot of books so you want to filter through what books you will actually need to study. The first part will be the general networking portion. No matter what area you are working for, chances are you have a good grasp on this portion. It just covers the basics that anyone working with computers as their profession should already know.

The rest of the questions will cover more specific topics, and this is where you want to look through and determine what you don’t know a lot about. There is lots of reading materials not only through Cisco Press books but also reading materials available online. You should take a look at the sample questions provided on the Cisco website for the written part of the CCIE exam so you get a feel for how the questions are asked.

At the very least, the questions are multiple choice so if you have a hard time figuring out what you should be studying, just study everything. As long as you are good at what you already do and are getting certification for a job you already have, chances are you’ll be able to pass the written CCIE exam.

To learn more about what resources you can use to study for the CCIE written exam, click here. There is much more information about the CCIE written exam and what it takes to get certified.

When you are preparing for an exam, any exam, the key is to know what you don’t know. No matter what stage you are in your preparation, it’s good to get a grasp on what you know and what you don’t know. This will help you to focus your efforts on areas where you need more time. This is key when studying effectively. This is exactly what the R&S Poly-Lab Assessment was built for. This is a product like none other on the CCIE market.

The poly-lab assessment lab was designed to assess how proficient you are on the topcis covered by the actual Cisco CCIE Routing & Switching Lab. The lab itself is dynamically generated from a enormous pool of tasks.

You can generate a lab from your Internetwork Expert’s members account. Shown in the screenshot above, it is located at the bottom if you click the tab labeled “Mock Labs & ASsessments”. Generating a lab requires 25 tokens and is free for customers who have purchsed the CCIE 2.0 program. Once you are ready to generate your lab, click the link labeled Poly-Lab Assessment homepage.

You can also get to this link by clicking the link in your gradedlabs members account dashboard. The direct link to this location is here.

Following the FAQ (Frequently asked questions) for the poly-lab you will see this section. Note: This poly-lab is generated based on a self-assessment of your knowledge of the different technology topics covered by the CCIE Routing & Switching Blueprint. For the most part, each lab generated is unique to you. Due to the nature of networking, you may see similar patterns appear in your labs as well as some task duplication.

Once we are at the screen shown above, we are ready to generate our specialized lab. It is durning this process that we must assess ourselves to judge our knowledge on these topics. If you have just passed the written CCIE, then you should probably set these sliders to beginner. Doing this just after passing the written exam is a great way to judge where you are with these technologies and where you should focus your studies. If you have been studying for some time now, then you should use the sliders to estimate your proficiency in each technology area. Don’t worry about the SAGE Rank just yet. This will be shown after we have taken the lab.

You will see this when you have placed all your sliders and click “Generate Lab”. To proceed click ok and 25 tokens will be deducted from your account.

After about thirty seconds or so, the page will refresh and you will see the new lab in the My Assessments section. Clicking preview, will show us our newly created lab. Based on my settings it seems that my lab will take 5 hours and 45 minutes. This is an estimate based on the points for each task.

There are 7 sections to the lab, each contains a series of tasks that need to be completed in order to have my lab graded. The next step is to rent a rack session. Since my lab has a suggested duration of 5 hours and 45 minutes, I will be booking out two rack sessions back-to-back in order to complete this lab. Note: Before you start be sure that you are on the same rack for both sessions, this will insure that your rack does not get reset durning the break between sessions.

Once you have rented a session that will cover the duration (Step 1), then previewed the lab (Step 2), and if you have a current session you will see the setup button (Step 3). When you’re ready to take the poly-lab, first click “Setup”.  This process will load your poly-labs initial configurations onto your active rack.  Setting up takes about 15 minutes.  After Setup is complete and you’re ready to start the poly-lab, click “Start”.  This will start the timer for your poly-lab. Once we have finished taking our poly-lab, then click the “Stop” button.  This save your configs and will grade your poly-lab. This grading pracess can take around 5 minutes or more.

We now have a new section in our INE members account, under the Mock Labs & Assessments Tab, “Labs I’ve Completed”. As you can see we now have a score summary in this section. I scored a 96% on my lab, but where did I go wrong? By clicking the More Info… link, we can get a breakdown of every task.

To begin with we have a simple breakdown for each section. This gives us a overall summary of where we should spend more time studying, but how well are we actually doing?

The first thing we have is the Points Per Hour (PPH). The PPH expected for the actual exam is 10. Scoring better than 10PPH is a good idea since you need 80 points to pass the exam and the exam is 8.5 hours of which .5 hours is a lunch break. (1) I have scored 27PPH and (2) the system has broken down my rank by each technology.

The next thing shown are recommended next steps. These are products which can help me getting a better grasp on the specific technology. Though not listed on recommendations, we suggest that you look at our learning capsules if you need more work on a specifict technology. Click here to see a list of our learning capsules.

Ok, I call this the fun part, but it’s really educational. The next part of the score report is a task-by-task analysis. Clicking on the icon next to the score gives you a break down of each assertion. This isn’t to fun if you got the task correct, but if you managed to mess something up, then this can be really quite useful.

It seems that I have missed everything on EIGRP Hub and Spoke. Now, let’s take a look at the assertions.

It seems I have missed R2, and my output is shown in the box. Next I click Show Correct Output to see exactly why I have missed this task.

Now I can see the correct assertions for this task.

This type of analysis is given for each task in the lab. This gives us a great way to determine where we might have messed up something and where we did things right. Overall, going through this process really help in our studies. Ideally, these poly-lab assessments should be taken about 4 or 5 times throughout our study process to guage our readiness for the actual CCIE Routing & Switching Lab Exam. Please post any questions below in the comment box.

Stil not convinced?
View the Poly-Lab FAQ.
Watch Brian McGhan’s V-Seminar as he walks through the poly-lab.

We are running a promotion for people who read our blog.  Save $5 off the poly-lab assessment just by using the discount code: 25082.  What is this number?  Read our previous post.

Graded Labs tokens are digital currency used to purchase different products from within your gradedlabs or Internetwork Expert members account. When you purchase a token, the amount of tokens you purchase ($1 USD = 1 Token) will be added to your total token balance within your members account. Tokens cannot be sold, traded, or refunded unless otherwise stated.

When in your members account you can see your overall token balance and the option to spend your token on several things. With tokens you can schedule a CCIE Routing & Switching Rack Rental, CCIE Routing & Switching Mock Lab, CCIE Security Rack Rental, CCIE Service Provider Rack Rental, and CCIE Voice Rack Rental.

Tokens are used for the convience of the customer in a variety of ways. First, tokens allow the customer to reschedule their own rack rentals. This can be done up to 72 hours before the start of your session. Secondly, gradedlabs and Internetwork Expert use dynamic pricing for rack rentals to ensure you are getting the absolute best value for your session.

Since the pricing of rack rentals is dynamic you can schedule your sessions at different times to save tokens. The dynamic pricing is based on a number of different factors. These include: time until session starts, availability and which CCIE track you are renting.

For example the picture above shows a simple snapshot for three days. The outlined box is for the current day, and inside the box depicts the sessions: s1, s2, s3 or s4 which correspond to a different time spot. A red session indicates that session is unavailable and green represents that session is available. If a session is available, the token price is shown next to the checkbox.

Tip – If your schedule is flexible, you can save even more money. If you wait until the session starts, the price of that session drops dramatically.

There are a number of ways that you can purchase more tokens. In fact almost every product in our online store is for tokens. The minimum number of tokens you can order is 15, but you don’t have to order in blocks of 15. You can browse the token products listed in the gradedlabs online store. This is a great way that you can refill your token balance.

For each track there is a product listed for rack rentals, but these products aren’t for actual rack rentals. Instead these products are for tokens that are used to purchase rack rentals. It is sometimes very confusing, but as mentioned above, the number of tokens per rack rental change so in order to sell a rack rental session we use tokens.

Note for every product that is for rack rentals there is a disclaimer on the product as shown above.

Your token balance is listed in your members account. To use these tokens click on the track in your members account. You will be shown a pop-up with the schedule as well as your token balance in the upper left corner. For example, I have 200 tokens available. When I click a session that I would like to book the balance is automatically updated in this section.

For example, I have selected to rent two sessions on the 31st. These sessions total to 35 tokens. That’s 11 hours of continuous rack time for 11 hours. This is three more hours of rack time for the same price as our competitors.

If you have any further comments or questions, please leave them below and we will get to them as soon as possible. I hope this helps to clear things up.