I am halfway towards my CCNP Security, and am finally gearing up to finish it.  When I completed the 642-618 FIREWALL and 642-648 VPN exams in the beginning of 2014, I was promptly sidetracked with the little things in life.  (Such as moving across the country, starting a new job, and finishing my BSIT at WGU.)  Knowing that the old CCNP Security exams had cycled out in April of 2014, I used Cisco’s CCNP Security Migration Path tool to validate that I was left with these two exams:
- 300-207 SITCS (Implementing Cisco Threat Control Solutions)
- 300-208 SISASÂ (Implementing Cisco Secure Access Solutions)
I am starting first with the 300-208 SISAS exam as it covers a range of topics, such as 802.1x, Cisco ISE, and Radius, that I am very familiar with.  However, from everything I’ve read, it goes into great depth on minutia of the ISE interface.  As I haven’t touched ISE in a production environment in over a year now, I’ve been spending time most evenings in my lab spinning up and down many different scenarios.
My lab for this study is entirely virtual, and is really a dry run for building my CCIE Security lab. Â It currently consists of the following, largely coordinated and controlled via GNS3:
- ISE 1.2 – VMWare Fusion on my MacBook
- ACS 5.6 – VMWare Fusion on my MacBook
- CentOS test boxes (x2) – VMWare Fusion on my MacBook
- IOU L2 Image (x2) – Rackspace Cloud Server
- IOU L3 Image (x6) – Rackspace Cloud Server
- ASA 8.4 (x2) – QEMU on a Rackspace Cloud Server
In the weeks to come I’ll be posting more about my exam preparations, including lab scenarios and links. Â This is mostly for myself, but if anyone else gets some use out of it too, even better.