My First Time at Cisco Live

I want to step away from the certification blogs for a minute and talk about my time at Cisco Live and just to clarify, Cisco Live US. It was my first time at Cisco Live (after working with Cisco gear for 20 years), and I certainly have some thoughts on this year’s event!

The Who, The What, and the Where

Cisco Live is one of (if not the biggest) technology conferences each year. It’s a 4-day event, Monday through Thursday, and usually in early June. The location has traditionally bounced around but in the last 2 years, it’s been in Las Vegas.

Cisco has two keynote speeches during the conference, usually an opening keynote and then a technical keynote, where C-level executives get up and talk about various Cisco initiatives.

The rest of the week is filled with the World of Solutions, a huge convention-like space full of vendors trying to sell you their products (or at least get your email for marketing purposes), Cisco Breakout Sessions (technical deep dives on various Cisco products/technologies, more on mine later), Cisco DevNet Zone and of course the Cisco appreciation night (usually Wednesday night).

As a first-timer, I was excited, and let me tell you, Cisco Live did NOT disappoint. Let’s dive into what my week looked like!

A Rundown of the Week

Depending on your situation, some people fly in on Saturday so they have a day to recover from travel and “get ready” for the crazy week ahead. I arrived on Sunday at noon, local time. Traveling from the East Coast, it’s a 3-hour difference from PA to Las Vegas, NV. I thought the time change might mess with me but the adrenaline of Cisco Live (and my first time in Vegas) kept me going and I had no problem with the time change. My Cisco technical engineer was on the same flight as me out of Philadelphia, so we found each other when we landed and grabbed a cab to our hotel (Luxor). The nice thing about Luxor is, it’s connected to Mandalay Bay Hotel which is where Cisco Live is when in Vegas. It was about a mile walk but it was all inside, which is nice.

I checked into my room and hooked up with my boss to walk over to the conference to check in and get my badge. Since I’m a part of the Cisco Champions community/program, I got early access to the World of Solutions (it technically didn’t open til Monday morning). As we walk through the WoS, we saw a few other champs hanging out, so we walk over, and hanging out with them is none other than David Bombal. David is a huge Youtube Creator who I’ve been learning from for the last 10 years, so meeting him was a cool moment and the conference hadn’t even started yet!

After I got done picking my jaw up off the floor, I walked with other champs and got some cool backstage tours of various pieces of Cisco Live, including a picture with the Lombardi Trophy (NFL Superbowl Trophy), if you’re not from the US or don’t like American football, Lombardi Trophy isn’t interesting to you :-)

The other thing about Cisco Live is the events and/or dinners that vendors put on during the week. One of the vendors we use had an event Sunday night at Top Golf, so we jetted there and had some food and swung some golf clubs (plus a few drinks). The conference hadn’t even started yet and day 1 was awesome. Here’s a picture of Du’An Lightfoot (aka LabEveryDay), Girard, and me in the cab on the way to TopGolf. Cozy!

Monday

Monday is the first “real” day of Cisco Live. Breakfast and lunch is provided, so I got up and headed to breakfast (which was pretty decent each day). Stashed an orange juice in my bag and headed off to my first breakout session. I won’t get too crazy technical on the breakout sessions I took but the first one was Introduction to Campus Wired LAN Deployment. For me, the session was a little to “novice” for me but I appreciated the refresher, a nice easy kickoff to the week. Hung around the World of Solutions for a bit before heading to breakout number 2 - Cisco Software Defined Access Solution Fundamentals. A lot of these sessions were an hour and a half long, so there wasn’t too much time between sessions. Connecting Cisco SD-Access to the External World was the third session of the day and rounding out the day was Enterprise End-to-End WAN Architecture. All the sessions were really good, with some really good deep dives on their respective topics.

After the rush of the first day of Cisco Live, I met up with fellow podcast co-host, Alex, and a friend of ours Nate (we all worked at EvolveIP together), we hit up Morton’s Steakhouse for our “big night out” together. My steak was amazing, top line and I’m glad I did it. Was great to hang out with the boys and shoot the shit (it’s been a few years since we were all together). After dinner, they went to gamble and I came back to Mandalay Bay where Cisco Champs had rented out a room at Ri Ra’s Irish pub for drinks and whatnot. I got there a bit later but there we still quite a few people there. Had some great conversations with Jordan at Netbox, Danielle at Cisco, and a few other really smart folks! Plus, the Guinness is always good!

The champs thing wound down and a few of us weren’t ready to go back to the hotel just yet. I’m a huge ice hockey guy and the Vegas Golden Knights were playing that night at T-Mobile Arena in Game 2 of the Stanley Cup, so we walked over to the bar that’s right outside the arena for a beer. That was a bit of a walk (again, mostly inside since the hotels are connected for the most part) but we had a blast!

Tuesday

The first Keynote was Tuesday at 8:30 am and it was held at the Michelob Ultra arena, which is the arena inside the Mandalay Bay Hotel. Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins kicked it off and the heavy theme this year was security. A couple of C-level folks got up there and talked their pieces with Jeetu Patel, EVP & GM being a big part of both keynotes.

After the first keynote, I was invited to participate in Tech Field Day -Xtra which I jumped at the chance to participate in. I know a lot of people that have participated in Tech Field Day and had really good things to say about it, so I trotted over to their setup and participated in the OpenGear presentation. Highly recommended!

After Tech Field Day, I hung out at the Cisco Champs space, the Social Media Hub, and Cisco DevNet zone which was pretty cool. DevNet had capture the flag contest going on, so I played around with their sdwan and Nexus Dashboard stuff, I spent a lot of time at the DevNet zone over the next 2 days! The one breakout session I went to on Tuesday was Infrastructure as Code for NXOS which I found very well done and informative. It was based around using Ansible to program the Nexus line of Cisco switches/routers, great stuff!

Another vendor took us out Tuesday night, this time to a Brazilian-style steakhouse. Let’s just say at the end of the night, I had the meat sweats!

Wednesday

Wednesday was the other keynote speaker at Michelob Ultra Arena. Cisco really highlighted their partnership with the NFL this year, so the keynote speaker was NFL Chief Security Officer, Cathy Lanier They had some amazing discussions around information security centered around an NFL game, just incredible what it takes! After Cathy’s discussion, comedian Jim Gaffigan took the stage for a half hour or so and absolutely killed it. He tore the house down with his “family style” routine and at least for me, my stomach hurt from laughing so hard.

After the keynote, I had a breakout session which I really enjoyed - ISE Design, Deploy & Best Practices. ISE is such a huge security piece in today’s environments and so I really enjoyed digging into the weeds a bit on ISE. I spent the rest of the day walking around World of Solutions, meeting some more Cisco Champs and DevNet Zone. Plus, I had another “full circle” moment when I met and chatted with Keith Barker from CBT Nuggets. Keith is another guy I’ve learned from over the last 15ish years and he was super nice and really easy to talk to. Plus, I got to hang with other content creators like Bearded IT Dad, TracketPacker, and Tim Bertino from the Art of Network Engineering Podcast. It’s pretty cool to chat with these folks online and then meet them in person, just a really cool experience!

Wednesday night is traditionally the Customer Appreciation Night, which usually entails fully catered food and drink and major headlining music acts. For this year, Cisco rented out Allegiant Stadium and the music was provided by Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani. Allegiant Stadium is within walking distance of the Mandalay Bay Hotel, so mid-afternoon, I met up with my Cisco Technical Engineer and had a few beers at one of the casino bars with some other clients of his and we all walked over together. A couple of drinks and some food, we were down on the floor for the concert and I have to be honest, Gwen Stefani was pretty good! I’m a sucker for some No Doubt, so it was a good time for the pre-teen memories No Doubt songs provided. Also, Blake Shelton was good as well, I get the feeling that there weren’t a lot of country music fans since his show seemed a little “sparse” but as a fan of country music (and my wife is a massive fan), I’ve seen Blake before and he’s always a good time. Overall, was a great time and I was ready to crash by the end of the night!

Thursday

Thursday was the most surprising day for me. Generally, Thursday is the last day of the conference and things start winding down. There are a few sessions that are available, WoS shuts down at about 1 pm, and people bring their luggage since a lot of them fly home Thursday night (I flew out Friday morning).

Rewinding to Wednesday night for just a second, when I was having drinks with our Cisco rep he mentioned that he went to the Cisco testing center and attempted his CCNP SCOR exam (and passed by the way) and he was saying how he went and just asked to take it “on the fly”. Typically if you get the full Cisco Live pass, you get a free shot at any Cisco cert of your choosing but you have to schedule it in advance (for obvious reasons). Long story short, Tim didn’t schedule his and got a spot last minute and passed. Congrats Tim! So that got me thinking, could I do that for the CCNA? I was recently approached by my local community college about teaching the Cisco Networking Academy in the fall but I had to be Cisco certified to do so, so the CCNA would definitely check that box. So Thursday after my morning session, I walked up to the testing center and asked if I could take the CCNA. The lady was very nice, she said I could but in the future, schedule the test ahead of time, 15 minutes later I was in a seat taking the CCNA. I ended up passing which I was surprised at, I’m usually not a good test taker and to walk in and take it “cold” is not my style, but I’ll take it! What had already been an incredible week was capped off nicely with a certification that I wasn’t expecting!

Thursday afternoon/night my buddy Girard and I took a cab down to Freemont St (old-time Vegas) and walked around a bit, gambled, drank a beer or two, and ultimately came back to the hotel to crash since it’d been such a crazy week. All in all, the trip was fantastic and I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

Wrapping Up

What else can I say about Cisco Live? Cisco really knows how to throw a party and as a first timer, they did not disappoint! I met some incredible people, learned a lot about some great technology and it ended on me passing the CCNA which was a nice surprise. For those that have not been, you have to try and get there! The World of Solutions is the big showcase with vendors from all walks of life representing. The people you meet is an absolute highlight of the trip and plus, it’s Las Vegas - what’s not to like?

Were you there? What were some of your experiences? I’d love to hear them! Leave a comment below or reach out to me on socials, I’d love to chat!