Another month down! March was a good month for my CCIE studies. It started off slow (I spent most of the first half focusing on my ENCOR course), but I put in several 8 hour days toward the end to catch up. Those are my favorite days—I love waking up in the morning with a full day of studying ahead. Here are my stats for March:
- Study hours: 64
- Flashcards made: 1,076
- Current total number of flashcards: 3,238
I do find that studying beyond ~5 hours in a day tends to get less productive (not unproductive, but definitely less focused than the first few hours of study). I’d love to hear your experience with “marathon” study sessions. Are you able to keep your study focused and productive for long periods? Any strategies?
Last month I signed up for Khawar Butt’s CCIE EI course on KBITS. Due to the time-zone difference, I won’t be joining the live sessions, but Khawar makes the recordings available so I’ll be watching them at my own pace. I’ve only watched a few recordings of previous sessions so far (Layer 2 technologies and EIGRP), but I can tell that it’s exactly what I’m looking for at this point. Here’s my plan for how I’m going to follow the course:
- Watch the week’s session.
- Do the labs in EVE-NG.
- Khawar provides EVE-NG lab files, making it very easy to follow along with each session. I set up EVE-NG on Google Cloud—if you make sure to stop your server when you’re not using it, it’s actually quite an affordable way to run a very powerful server for labs.
- Spend the rest of the week studying what Khawar covered using other resources: RFCs, books, Cisco docs, etc. I like to use Khawar’s lab topologies in this stage too, but more as a base for experimentation rather than following the exact lab instructions he provides.
It’s too early for me to give much of a review of KBITS, but I’m loving it so far. I’ll give more thoughts as I continue through the course.
Another resource I’m interested in using is CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure Foundation by Narbik Kocharians. I’m not sure if I’ll be using it at the same time as Khawar’s course, or if I should wait until I’m done with it. Like Khawar, Narbik provides EVE-NG files, making it easy to load the labs and do them yourself. If anyone reading this has experience with these resources, let me know your thoughts.
I’ll leave it at that for this month. I still have a LONG way to go, but I’m getting more and more excited about finally taking on the CCIE exam. See you in a month!
Awesome Jeremy! I just finished kbits, watched the whole bootcamp that started by the end of 2025. I really enjoyed, Khawar explains the topics very well and you are able to get in touch with everything you are going to see in the lab. I did all the labs, except SDX stuff, i dont have a lab enviroment for this right now, but in my work i got a plenty hands-on with SD-WAN, which is the most important from the lab’s perspective (compared to SDA), at least it is what i heard. The workbook by Khawar is okay, but the Narbik’s workbook is much better, because you have a lot of explanations and is goes much depper as well. Now, my plan is to do his workbook cover by cover (which is gonna take some time), than i am thinking to join his bootcamp or just create full mock labs, and crush the CLI for bit, until i feel confident to take the lab.