r/ccnp

Hello folks,

I passed my CCNA a few years ago and was fortunate enough to land a Network Engineer role, working with technologies like BGP and IS-IS and many more

What would be a good place to start this journey? This is what i found so far so please correct me if i am wrong

So far these are the resources I’ve looked at:

• Kevin Wallace — seems very solid, but also quite expensive
• CBT Nuggets — used it for CCNA and Junos exams helpful, though I still had to supplement with other resources
• Neil Anderson — also used for CCNA good overall, but I still needed outside resources at times (probably because CCNA covers such a broad scope)
• Jeremy’s IT Lab — really liked his CCNA content, CCNP course is still incomplete
• OCG book (CCNP and CCIE Enterprise Core ENCOR 350-401, I don't understand why it states CCIE in the book title?

I would like to get a pointer on what would be the best route for learning CCNP? Thanks

Hello everyone !

I've seen some posts regarding the 31 Days Before your CCNP, but they were kinda old, compared to the latest minor update from ENCOR. So, has anyone used the 31 Days Before your CCNP ? And how good or bad it was compared to the actual OCG (2nd edition) ? Is worth still buying it ?

Hey everyone,

I'm prepping for the CCNP Enterprise on a Lenovo P15 Gen 1. On paper it should be more than enough:

• Intel i7-10850H (6C/12T)
• 64GB RAM (4x16GB)
• EVE-NG on VMware Workstation Pro with 48GB and all 12 threads assigned

In practice? It's struggling.

My target topology is a full campus: 2x Cat9k, 2x Nexus 9k, 2x FTD, and a couple of C8k edge routers. The problem is the Cat9k images alone default to 18GB RAM each, just spinning those two up pushes memory to 90% and I start getting OOM errors before anything else is even online.

I'm weighing two options:

1. RAM upgrade : (~$400) , swap the 16GB sticks for 32GB and go to 128GB total
2. CML subscription : pay for Cisco Modeling Labs, get up to 20 nodes, and hope their optimized images are lighter on my current hardware

I keep seeing people online running massive multi-site topologies and I genuinely wonder what they're running underneath. Are they all on dual-socket EPYC workstations with 256GB+ sitting in a home lab rack?

Has anyone actually pulled off a full CCNP campus lab on a laptop, or is that just not realistic? And if you've used CML , do the images actually run leaner than what you'd pull from CCO?

Hey everyone, long post but I really need an outside perspective. I've been feeling stuck lately and want to know if I'm thinking about this the right way or just venting into the void lol.

I currently have my A+, Net+, working on Sec+ to renew my other certs, CCNA (good until summer 2027), and a Bachelor's degree. My plan is to spend the next 6 months studying for the CCNP ENCORE, then go after a concentration exam after that. My day-to-day is pretty hands-on with switch configurations, IP reservations, AAA server, and working with vendors on port and address requirements for new devices in our OT networks. I submit Jira tickets to our Enterprise team for firewall changes and DHCP scope additions, but I do have read access to the firewall. The work is fine, but the deeper stuff like routing changes and firewall configs always gets handed off via ticket. I want to actually own that work someday, not just request it.

I've tried reaching out to people here for mentorship and guidance and I basically get crickets. Nobody seems interested in helping others grow. And from what I can see, certs and technical skills don't really get rewarded at this company. It feels like the people moving up are the ones playing the corporate game — talking the talk in meetings, working the politics — not necessarily the ones with the deepest technical skills. To make things worse, my company is now switching to Extreme Networks which seems super GUI-focused. I'm worried that moving away from Cisco CLI is going to hurt my resume and slow down my growth long-term. At this point I'm pretty set on getting the CCNP and then starting to look elsewhere — somewhere that actually values technical growth.

Is 6 months a realistic timeline to be ready for the CCNP ENCORE, or am I setting myself up to rush it? Also, am I overthinking all of this, or is this a solid plan?

I feel like I'm doing the right things but just stuck in the wrong environment. Would really appreciate any advice from people who've been through something similar. Thanks!

Howdy Friends.

I'm sure this question has been answered in a manpage or even in a forum post in some manner in the past, but I'm pretty dense and usually require direct instruction. Also I'm lazy.

I'm wondering if I use tshark or editcap for this and need some help putting together a script or .bat file that can do the following - let's say I have 100 captures that were unfiltered.

I need to generate 3 files from each - one containing tcp, one containing udp and icmp, and one containing all traffic that's not either of those. I know how to open each file individually, apply display filters and export the files I need. But that's going to take hours. I'm hoping there's a way to automate this - does anybody have any insight? I've already used editcap to manipulate the snaplen of all the captured packets - that's pretty easy. I just need to speed up the production of the filtered files.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

I'm currently struggling to break into tech, I updated and changed my resume many times, but It seems is not working. Of course It's important to mention that I migrate to the country a couple of years ago and I don't have contacts (don't know almost anybody in the city) which is needed sometimes to start in IT.

I have the CCNA, AWS SAA, and some cybersecurity fudamentals certs, do you think having the CCNP would help to stand out between applicants? or having some extra skills in linux like doing the compTIA linux+?

Hello I am currently a field tech for a company and I do enjoy it a lot but sadly I am unsure on job security in the future years due to nature of the business. SO that said i am trying to decide on either doing wgu bachelors for IT cause the company will help on it or ccnp enterprise I am going to do both and I am a fast studier I have my comptia trifecta and associates so I'd only need a few for specialization then have my bachelors. Does anyone here have a recommendation from past experience I found posts pointing both ways when I was researching older posts.

Hi all, I have been following the Cisco subreddits for years and I always noticed the same posts, specially now with the AI boom:
"Job market is screwed" "Can the CCNA get me a job?" etc..

I just want to say that nothing major changed in the past 10 years, CCNA is still valid, networking skills are still valid and we still need network engineers.

I started my journey like many of you, I got my CCNA and started working in a NOC. I quit university and focused on learning things on my own. After the working a few years at the NOC, I was able to jump to a help-desk job and after that to a Junior network engineer role.
I am from south america, and after a few years of working there I was able to find a senior network engineer role in Europe. They paid me for my relocation and gave me a visa.

And here comes the important part
In my new job in europe, we hired people from all over the world, and we were looking for network engineers. I did multiple interviews, and it was incredible how people DO NOT KNOW networking! They come to the interviews and they cannot answer simple troubleshooting questions.

Basically what I am trying to say is that if you lab a lot, if you know your fundamentals and if you can defend yourself in an interview, there are still open roles.
Netowrking is a very niche field, there are very few people in the world that can properly understand networking, and for those people there are opportunities.

So just hang in there, do your certs but most imporatanly, learn the stuff. If you know what you are talking about, you will do good.

We are over a month now after going live on the new exam. How's everyone feeling about it? I was waiting until the change to really go after it. My work will pay for encor and enarsi so I'm about dive back in, thanks for reading, cheers.

I'm looking for a definitive, practical, and structured guide for learning and configuring IPsec. Not just random vendor docs or copy-paste configs, but something that teaches:

* Tunnel mode vs Transport mode

* IKEv1 vs IKEv2

* Phase 1 / Phase 2

* route-based vs policy-based VPNs

* troubleshooting

* interoperability between vendors

* real-world deployment practices

Could be:

* a book (not some huge book though)

* a course

* documentation

* CCNP/JNCIS material

* strongSwan/pfSense/Fortinet/Cisco focused

* even specific chapters from larger networking books

What would you recommend?

One annoying part of building a networking lab is that even if the labs themselves are the goal, the host underneath can become a project of its own.

I ended up automating the EVE-NG host path so it is easier to rebuild cleanly:

• provision the lab VM
• configure EVE-NG
• run a healthcheck after deployment

For me the value was not “more tooling for the sake of it”, it was reducing the pain of ending up with a lab host that works but would be messy to recreate from scratch.

For people learning with EVE-NG: are you still building the host manually each time, or have you started automating that part too?

Hello everyone !

Hope you all are doing great !

For those that completed the BGP Section of the ENCOR path in the INE Platform. Did you guys used any other resource along with the course ? For example: Routing TCP/IP, OCG, RFCs, etc.

Post your thoughts and experiences with it !

Thanks !

I've been having trouble trying to get my desktop to run VMs through VMware since January. Today, a coworker of mine said to buy a NUC. The thing is, they are quite expensive for anything with 32gb of RAM. If I get a NUC and ONLY run EVE-NG on it just for labbing, will 16 GB of RAM be a comfortable amount?

Hi all!

I have the ENCOR 350-401 v1.1 (from before March 2026) and I would like to have the CCNP Wireless.

If I do one of these new concentration exams 300-110 WLSD v1.2 or WLSI 300-120 v1.2, will they give me the CCNP Wireless certification?

I just discovered the Pearsontestprep practice exam. On the first go, I chose 100 questions covering all topics and ended up with 94/100 correct. Am I good to go, or should I keep practicing different methods? OCG is complete and CBT is viewed.