In this section, we explore the world of programming, algorithms, networks, and infrastructure
This hands-on lab configures Flex Links between two uplinks on an access switch, providing sub-second failover without relying on Spanning Tree at all, and verifies traffic automatically shifts to the backup link when the primary fails.
This hands-on lab configures PVLAN Edge (protected ports) on two access ports within the same VLAN, isolating them from each other at Layer 2 while both retain normal connectivity to an uplink port, demonstrating a lightweight isolation feature that requires no separate VLAN.
This hands-on lab configures storm control thresholds on a switch port to limit broadcast and multicast traffic, simulating a broadcast storm and verifying the switch suppresses excess traffic before it can overwhelm the network.
This hands-on lab configures a VLAN Access Control List using a VLAN access-map to filter traffic within a single VLAN at Layer 2, something a standard router-applied ACL cannot achieve since traffic never leaves the VLAN to reach a routed interface.
This hands-on lab configures a full Private VLAN structure with a primary VLAN and both isolated and community secondary VLANs, demonstrating fine-grained Layer 2 isolation within a single IP subnet beyond what the simple protected-port feature from an earlier lab can achieve.
This hands-on lab configures SVI autostate exclude on a monitoring port within a VLAN, preventing that single inactive port from incorrectly bringing down the SVI for an entire VLAN that still has other active member ports.
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.
