Welcome to ONT! In 2006, Cisco Press came to me and told me, albeit very quietly, that there was going to be a major revision of the CCNP certification exams. Then they asked whether I would be interested in working on a command guide in the same fashion as my previous books for Cisco Press: the Cisco Networking Academy Program CCNA Command Quick Reference and the CCNA Portable Command Guide. The original idea was to create a single-volume command summary for all four of the new CCNP exams. However, early on in my research I quickly discovered that there was far too much information in the four exams to create a single volume; that would have resulted in a book that was neither portable nor quick as a reference. So when I jokingly suggested that they let me author four books—one for each exam—who would have expected Cisco Press to agree? Well, you have to be careful for what you wish for, as Cisco Press readily agreed. Realizing that this was going to be too much for one part-time author to handle, I quickly got my colleague Hans Roth on board as a co-author.
This book is the fourth and final volume in a four-volume set that attempts to summarize the commands and concepts that you need to know in order to pass one of the CCNP certification exams—in this case, the Optimizing Converged Cisco Networks (ONT) exam. It follows the format of my previous books, which are in fact a cleaned-up version of my own personal engineering journals—a small notebook that can be carried around and that contains little nuggets of information—commands that you forget, the IP addressing scheme of some remote part of the network, and little reminders about how to do something you only have to do once or twice a year, but that is vital to the integrity and maintenance of your network.
With the creation of two brand-new CCNP exams, the amount of new information out there is growing on an almost daily basis. There is always a new white paper to read, a new Webinar to view, another slideshow from a Networkers session that was never attended. The engineering journal can be that central repository of information that won't weigh you down as you carry it from the office or cubicle to the server and infrastructure room in some branch office.
To make this guide a more realistic one for you to use, the folks at Cisco Press have decided to continue with an appendix of blank pages—pages that are for you to put your own personal touches—your own configs, commands that are not in this book but are needed in your world, and so on. That way this book will hopefully look less like the authors' journals, but more like your own.