study guide

This is my study plan for the Cisco CCNP Datacenter.

The certification has four exams:

• 300-175 DCUCI Exam -Unified Computing My 300-175 Study Guide
• 300-165 DCII Exam -Infrastructure/networking
• 300-170 DCVAI Exam -Virtual Automation

The above are all required, and either of the below

• 300-160 DCID Exam -Designing Infrastructure
  or
• 300-180 DCIT Exam -Troubleshooting

Unfortunately, the exam has recently been updated which makes finding study resources difficult. Actually, it’s a good thing the exam has been updated as the old exam was really out of date and required studying of hardware and software that I defiantly won’t be implementing, even if I do come across them occasionally in my work. So it’s great that I have the opportunity to learn newer technology, but with the downside that there is more limited resources for study.

I signed up for Cisco’s Learning Center Videos, only to find that all the videos are for the old version of the exam, and not really helpful.

I usually like CBT Nuggets, but found that they to only have videos for the previous version of the exam. They do have a post outlining the differences with the new CCNP exam, but nearly a year later still don’t have any new courses.

I haven’t been able to find any guide books, so it looks like I’ll be studying the hard way: Review the exam topics, read the white papers and administration guides, then practice in labs. I generally prefer to have a more structured and efficient way to work towards an exam, but this will probably give me a more through understanding.

This is a plan for studying for the DCUCI exam. It is currently a work in progress, and will be updated as I work through the material. It is mostly to help me stay organized and keep on track, but as there aren’t that many guides for the current version 6.0 of this exam (updated in 2017), I thought I would share this for anyone else to use as a starting point for their own studies.

The first place to start of course is with the exam topics. This doesn’t provide that much detail of what is needed to study, but the best place to start is with the administration guides. The exam is based on v2.x, but I am studying on 3.2 as it is the most current and will be most relevant to my real world implementations. Both versions have similar workflows, and I plan to do practice labs in both versions so I will be familiar with both.

Now, for the bulk of reading materials:

• Cisco UCS Manager Guides – list of all guides
• Cisco UCS Manager Administration Management Guide 3.2
• Cisco UCS Manager Network Management Guide, Release 3.2
• Cisco UCS Manager Server Management Guide, Release 3.2
• Cisco UCS Manager Storage Management Guide, Release 3.2
• Cisco UCS Manager Infrastructure Management Guide, Release 3.2
• Cisco UCS Manager Firmware Management Guide, Release 3.2
• Cisco UCS Manager System Monitoring Guide, Release 3.2

Although these guides are very through and contain tons of relevant information, they often provide lots of specific details on how to configure something with every available option, but don’t always include why, or simplified typical scenarios. For that reason, I also plan to also read Implementing Cisco UCS Solutions -Second Edition

I plan to do labs using the Cisco UCS Platform Emulator. I plan to use version 2.2 to prepare for the exam, and version 3.1 while reading the guides and for becoming more familiar with what I typically use at work.

A good (and free) resource for Network Engineers learning about storage: Introduction to Storage Area Networks I may not read this, as my background is with storage and compute infrastructure, but it may be useful for others.

CBT Nuggets are usually a good resource to bring some of the specific concepts together, however they still have not updated the course to for the new version of the exam. It appears that a lot of the course focuses on hardware which is no longer relevant, so I won’t be using CBT Nuggets unless they release a newer version of the course.

Good information from Yuri who has already passed the exam