Huawei network devices are becoming more and more popular in European market lately. It all started with 3G adapters, then mobiles, and now I see routers and switches deployed in many locations.

For a project I’ll deploy in the next few weeks I had the opportunity to attend an Huawei training.

Huawei provides a fast-track for people already certified with other vendors, three training courses are condensed in just one week but it works if you don’t want to hear for the 100th time how STP works ;)

The track I did was HCDP  FastTrack (aka HCNP R&S) that overlaps many topics with Cisco’s CCNP R&S and CCIE R&S.

Since I’m born in networks with Cisco, to learn another CLI is like learn a foreign language, you can speak it but it’s not your native.

The good thing is Huawei’s CLI is very similar to 3COM’s that I had the opportunity to work with quite often in the past years. Some concepts where new (like some types of particular VLANs behavior) but I didn’t find topics hard to understand.

The material provided with the course is not complete or flawless but the references available in the website and some quick labs helped me to prepare the certification exam.

The emulator

Huawei provides an emulator called ENSP very similar to GNS3 to do some labs. It works fine and CPU/memory requirements are not too high. It uses VirtualBox under the hood. I’ve used it to configure routing OSPF/BGP and some MPLS.

The certification