CCIE Data Center (v3.0) - Technical Classes

based on the topics listed in the VCP-CMA exam guide, here's a brief explanation of each section and what you should focus on to prepare for the exam:

1. Data Center Fabric Infrastructure (15%)

   • Understand the physical components of the fabric (controllers, switches) and how they work together.
   • Be familiar with fabric policies such as access policies, multi-tenancy, and monitoring policies including health indicators and audit logs.
   • Know about virtual networking aspects like vSphere VDS, application profiles, EPGs, and the various policies and security models associated with tenant isolation.

2. Data Center Fabric Connectivity (15%)

   • Learn about VRF lite, L3Out configurations including OSPF, iBGP, and route redistribution.
   • Understand multi-Pod, multi-Site, and virtual POD connectivity, as well as transit routing principles.
   • Study overlay technologies like VXLAN EVPN to understand how they are used in the data center for segmentation and scalability.

3. Data Center Compute (15%)

   • Familiarize yourself with compute resources, including UCSM policies, profiles, templates, and Hyperflex configurations.
   • Understand compute connectivity to SAN/LAN uplinks, rack server integration, and the implications of different port modes.

4. Data Center Storage Protocols and Features (10%)

   • Dive into Fibre Channel (FC) and its variants like FCoE, iSCSI with authentication, multipathing, and other protocol features.
   • Understand RoCE v2 over IP networks for high-performance storage connectivity.

5. Data Center Security and Network Services (10%)

   • Study security features such as ACLs, first hop security, port security, and Private VLANs with contracts.
   • Learn about role-based access control (RBAC) and authentication protocols like Radius, TACACS+, and LDAP.
   • Understand network services insertion, redirection, and the use of route targets, prefix lists, and DHCP, NTP/PTP, flow export, SPAN, and syslog for monitoring and diagnostics.

6. Traffic Management (10%)

   • Traffic management encompasses queueing, policing, classification/marking, scheduling, and the use of CoPP to manage and prioritize traffic within the data center.

7. Data Center Automation and Orchestration (15%)

   • Learn how to automate data center tasks using scripting languages like Python and Ansible, including the use of RESTful APIs for CRUD operations.
   • Understand how to utilize tools for automation and orchestration, such as DCNM and UCSD, to deploy, configure, monitor, and manage data center resources efficiently.

To prepare for the VCP-CMA exam, you should focus on understanding each of these areas thoroughly. Hands-on experience with Cisco's data center solutions, including NX-OS and UCS, is crucial. Additionally, familiarize yourself with the Cisco DNA Center and how it can automate tasks across the network and compute resources. Practice deploying configurations, monitoring the system, and automating tasks using both command-line interfaces (CLI) and programmable approaches with APIs and orchestration tools. Review the official Cisco exam guide for the VCP-CMA to understand the specific weight of each topic and focus your studies accordingly.