After having finally gotten my degree out of the way, I’ve found some relief to the constant studying that I’ve had to engage in.

On the other hand, I’ve really wanted to delve deeper down the networking path, as I feel I have a great breadth of knowledge but I don’t have a specialty I can truly claim expert-level knowledge in. I’d like to attack this on two fronts. The go to certification for a Network Engineer is probably Cisco’s CCNP. A less obvious choice, but a good one given my background in virtualization (especially of the VMware flavor) is the VMware VCP6-NV, which focuses on VMware NSX, their network virtualization product. I suppose I should note that my ulterior motive here to to renew my aging VCP5-DCV before it expires.

Given the time constraints, I’d like to knock out the VCP6-NV out first, so I don’t have to add any other tests into the mix. This way, I can actually learn something while renewing a valuable certification.

A lot of folks will tell your that the HOL (Hands-on Labs) are the way to go (and it probably is really the way to go). But being somewhat of a contrarian and having a lot of hardware on hand, I’ve decided the way to go is to build a virtual NSX lab within my home lab environment, leveraging nested ESXi instances, which will, in turn, host the various NSX virtual appliances. Once I’ve hammered out a topology I like, I’ll share it. I have a beefy server with 144 GB of RAM sitting in my lab, so I’ll probably do a fairly large-scale lab such that I can implement all of the features I could conceivably need for the VCP6-NV.