• Candidates who want to become CCDE certified
• Existing CCIEs who need to re-certify their CCIE qualification and/or want to get CCDE certified 

There are no formal prerequisites for CCDE certification; other professional certifications or training courses are not required. The CCDE certification is intended for candidates who have day-to-day responsibilities for creating work products that cover IP routing network infrastructure design.

Candidates should also have:

• A minimum of seven years job experience in network engineering
• A thorough understanding of networking infrastructure principles
• An in-depth understanding of the topics in the exam blueprints
• Have a determined attitude, patience and strong will.

CCDE Assesses advanced Network Infrastructure Design Principles and Fundamentals for large networks. A CCDE can demonstrate an ability to develop solutions which address planning, design, integration, optimization, operations, security and ongoing support focused at the infrastructure level for customer networks.

The CCDE certification is focused on professionals responsible for network design. In contrast, the CCIE certification is focused on professionals responsible for network implementation and operation.

The Fast Lane CCDE Written Boot Camp does not include the actual exam, but provides delegates with the necessary theory to prepare for the two-hour, multiple choice test. It will include routing and switching network theory related to topics that will be covered in the exam, such as:

• MPLS
• IP routing
• BGP
• QoS
• IS-IS
• and some equipment commands.

Delegates should be prepared to work beyond the usual classroom hours in order to prepare for the written exam

This 4 day course will prepare delegates for the two hour written CCIE exam.

IP Routing:

• Explain route aggregation concepts and techniques.
• Explain the theory and application of network topology abstraction and layering.
• Explain the impact of fault isolation and resiliency on network design.
• Explain metric based traffic flow and modification.
• Explain fast convergence techniques and mechanisms.
• Explain routing protocol operation.
• Select lower operational costs and complexity.
• Explain transport mechanisms and interaction with routing protocols.
• Explain generic routing and addressing concepts.
• Explain multicast routing concepts.

Tunneling:

• Explain how tunneling affects end service applications.
• Explain, recognize, and select tunneling techniques appropriate to the size and scale of the network requirements.
• Explain how L3 routing is affected by tunneling technologies and select L3 routing protocols appropriate to implement tunneling and as passenger traffic in tunnels.
• Explain, recognize, and select logical and physical topologies required to meet network design requirements.
• Explain, recognize, and select methods for interconnecting tunneling environments across one or more service provider networks.
• Explain, recognize, and select methods for steering traffic with tunnels and into tunnels.
• Explain, recognize, and select methods for providing network failover and redundancy to meet network availability requirements.
• Explain, recognize, and select methods for interconnecting different types of attachment media on tunnel endpoints. Recognize and explain the differences in mapping different L2 technologies onto an L3 tunneling environment.
• Explain, recognize, and select methods to manage the size and scale of broadcast domains in tunneled L2VPN environments.

QoS:

• Measure and interpret different QoS performance metrics.
• Determine why, where and how to implement traffic classification, traffic conditioning and PHB.
• Explain operations of RSVP.
• Explain generic QoS requirements for common application (VoIP, Video, TCP, UDP, control plane traffic).
• Explain the techniques to avoid Class starvation when multiple classes are used (EF and non-EF).
• Explain the interaction of IP DSCP with other marking schemes (IP Prec, .1P, MPLS EXP, ATM, Frame Relay).
• Explain QoS based routing (PBR).

Management:

• Analyze network conditions and behaviour to determine potential degradation or failure conditions.
• Explain the operation and advantages of different management access mechanisms.
• Explain the operation and use of network management protocols.
• Identify network management tools and their uses.
• Identify auditable factors in a network.
• Explain traffic management concepts and actions based on traffic statistics.
• Recognize configuration management tools and best practices.

Security:

• Explain the impact of security availability design in the characteristics of a network.
• Use available tools in a network security design to address identity, monitoring and correlation aspects.
• Explain the impact of control plane design decisions on the security of a network; implement security mechanisms to protect the control plane.
• Explain the impact of data plane design decisions on the security of a network; implement security mechanisms to protect the data plane.
• Prepare and explain security incident preparation and response strategies in a network.