Cisco’s CCIE Routing and Switching certification exam has been more than a decade one of the most popular Expert level Operational-based exams. In fact, all CCIE exams are operational exams, and the only design exam for Cisco, at the expert level is CCDE.
CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure is the successor of the CCIE Routing and Switching exam and there are many differences between them. There are very few ccie enterprise infrastructure online training at the moment available, and covering each and every topic of the exam blueprint is important if you want to pass the exam on your first attempt.!
CCIE Routing Switching exam has been just coming with the operational tasks. You need to configure the protocols and the technologies, you need to make sure the solution that you configure works. Or they give you the problem and you look at the configuration and understand the issue and fix it, basically troubleshooting it.
All of them are necessary for real-life networks but most importantly if you don’t know why you are doing the things that you do, you might be choosing the wrong solution for the problem. In fact, you can even create more problems.
Design is interested in Why, and operation is looking for How.
How to configure, How to deploy, how to troubleshoot, how to maintain, how protocols work etc.
The design would ask Why I am configuring this?
Are there alternatives?
What would be the pros and the cons of the different solutions?
Advantages and disadvantages of various different deployment options.
It would look at what would be the correct order of operation to reduce the downtime, migrate smoothly, to avoid problems during the deployments.
Good design helps the operation a lot.
Instead of having large maintenance windows, you would reduce the time dramatically.
In the CCIE Routing and Switching exam, Cisco was asking about the traditional technologies.
These are routing protocols, such as OSPF, EIGRP – Cisco preparatory routing protocol, BGP, MPLS, Multicast, Quality of Service, Network Management, Assurance, Network Security, Layer 2 technologies, etc.
In the CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure, the needs of the current enterprise networks are considered well and many new evolving technologies have been placed in the exam blueprint.
SDN technologies such as Software-Defined Wide Area Network, SDA- Software-Defined Access, Cloud Networking, Network Automation, and Programmability are some of the very new technologies that come in the CCIE Enterprise exam.
You need to understand these technologies from the operational and the design aspects.
These are very high-level differences between the CCIE Routing and Switching and CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure exams.
Both are lab-based exams. Both are done at the Cisco Systems’ own facilities. CCIE Routing and Switching have been deprecated and only the CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure exam is available anymore.
