A Cisco Router Lab is a hands-on practice environment for learning, configuring, and troubleshooting Cisco networks from the foundational CCNA level all the way to the expert CCIE level.
This hands-on lab configures HSRP for IPv6 between two routers, demonstrating the option to use an automatically generated link-local virtual address rather than manually assigning one, and verifies failover behavior mirrors the IPv4 HSRP lab covered earlier in this series.
This hands-on lab configures GLBP weighting tied to interface tracking, allowing the proportion of clients each forwarder serves to shift automatically based on a router's own health rather than always splitting load evenly, refining the basic GLBP configuration covered earlier in this series.
This hands-on lab configures a voice VLAN on an access switch port, allowing an IP phone and an attached PC to share a single physical port while remaining on separate VLANs, with the phone's traffic automatically tagged and the PC's traffic left untagged.
This hands-on lab configures MST across two switches, mapping multiple VLANs into a single spanning-tree instance rather than running a separate instance per VLAN as PVST+ does, and verifies the resulting reduction in the number of independent spanning-tree calculations.
This hands-on lab connects an MST region to a switch still running Rapid PVST+, verifying MST's built-in interoperability correctly represents the PVST+ switch's per-VLAN topology at the region boundary without requiring every switch in the network to migrate simultaneously.
This hands-on lab configures and compares different EtherChannel load-balancing algorithms, verifying how the choice of hashing input affects whether traffic is actually distributed evenly across bundled links or concentrated onto a single member link.
This hands-on lab configures LACPDU fast rate on an EtherChannel bundle, reducing the interval between LACP control packets to accelerate detection of a failed member link compared to the default slow rate.
This hands-on lab configures a routed EtherChannel between two Layer 3 switches, bundling two physical links into a single logical routed interface rather than a switched trunk, and verifies OSPF forms a single neighbor relationship across the bundle rather than one per physical link.
This hands-on lab configures VRF-Lite on a router to maintain two completely separate routing tables for two different customer networks sharing the same physical router, verifying each VRF's traffic remains isolated despite using overlapping IP address space.
This hands-on lab configures selective route leaking between two VRFs using route targets and a shared services VRF, allowing specific routes to cross the otherwise strict isolation boundary established in the previous VRF-Lite lab.
This hands-on lab configures Policy-Based Routing on a router to send traffic from a specific source subnet out a different path than the normal routing table would select, overriding the destination-based forwarding decision that every previous routing lab in this series relied on.
This hands-on lab configures eBGP between two routers in different autonomous systems with a full verification workflow, examining the BGP table, AS-path attribute, and confirming routes are correctly installed with eBGP's default administrative distance.
