February has been certification time. I finally had the opportunity to take the Check Point Security Administration & Engineering R77 5-Day Bootcamp class at the end of January. I took the following week to re-read all of the material from the class, as well as the admin guides that were applicable to the material. I sat for the CCSA exam at the end of the week, February 6th, and the hard work paid off with a score of 95%.

On the same day that I sat for the CCSA, I received my notice from VMware that my VCP4-DV certification was expiring in 30 days, so I set aside some time for that. I feel pretty comfortable with the content in the VCP exam, but I figured I might as well branch out and see if I could grab the VMware VCP-NV certification. I don’t work on the server side all that much anymore, and I figure that I may as well keep concentrating towards networking. I downloaded the exam blueprint, and all of the documents that they recommend in it. The design guide was awesome! I am so glad that I took that network virtualization path because the technology is just a lot of fun, for me anyways. It solves a lot of different problems that I’ve run across before, but never had the opportunity to pursue. Simplifying the underlying network infrastructure into a minimal IP network, and then using automated network virtualization on top of it provides a lot of flexibility for growth and redundancy, particularly in regards to having an enterprise that spans multiple data centers. After a week of filling my head with all things VMware NSX and vSphere vDS, I sat for the exam on Friday the 13th, spooky! Scored a 96% on that one.

Next up is going to be either AWS or GSEC!