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 a basic VXLAN tunnel between two switches using static head-end replication, extending a single Layer 2 VLAN across an IP-routed underlay network without requiring the VLAN to be trunked hop-by-hop.
This hands-on lab replaces the static head-end replication from the previous lab with a BGP EVPN control plane, allowing VTEPs to dynamically learn each other's MAC and IP information rather than relying on manually configured peer lists.
This hands-on lab configures Segment Routing over an OSPF-enabled network, assigning a global segment ID to each router's loopback and verifying traffic follows label-based forwarding without requiring LDP, contrasting SR against the traditional MPLS control plane.
This hands-on lab presents a complex failure spanning BGP path selection, a VXLAN VNI mismatch, and a QoS policy misapplication simultaneously, requiring the systematic layer-by-layer troubleshooting approach used throughout this series to isolate and resolve all three faults.
This hands-on lab configures a basic Cisco SD-WAN-style overlay using underlying IOS-XE SD-WAN CLI constructs, establishing control connections and a data plane tunnel between two edge routers, contrasting the centralized policy model against the manually configured DMVPN overlays covered earlier in this series.
This hands-on lab configures a centralized SD-WAN data policy identifying voice traffic and steering it onto a preferred low-latency transport path, demonstrating application-aware routing decisions made centrally rather than through per-device route-maps.
This hands-on lab configures a basic SD-Access-style fabric using LISP as the control plane and VXLAN as the data plane, registering an endpoint's location with a map server and verifying traffic between two fabric edge nodes is encapsulated using the endpoint's dynamically learned location.
This hands-on lab assigns Scalable Group Tags to endpoints via 802.1X authorization, configures an SGT-based access policy independent of IP addressing, and verifies traffic is permitted or denied based purely on group membership rather than subnet or VLAN.
This hands-on lab configures PIM Sparse Mode across three routers with a designated Rendezvous Point, verifying a multicast receiver joins the shared tree and traffic from a source reaches the receiver through RP-based forwarding.
This hands-on lab observes a receiver's last-hop router automatically switch from the shared RP-rooted tree to a direct shortest-path tree toward the source once traffic volume crosses the default threshold, verifying both tree types appear in the multicast routing table at different stages.
This hands-on lab configures PIM in an HSRP environment, verifying that multicast forwarding correctly follows the active HSRP router rather than being split unpredictably between both routers in the redundancy pair.
This hands-on lab configures IS-IS between three routers using a single-area Level 2 design, verifying adjacencies form, routes are exchanged, and comparing IS-IS's NET addressing and terminology against the OSPF configuration approach covered earlier in this series.
