Infrastructure, Systems, and Connectivity
This hands-on lab configures DNS64 synthesis on a router, automatically generating the synthesized IPv6 address a client needs to reach an IPv4-only destination without requiring the client to manually construct it, completing the transition mechanism started with NAT64 in the previous lab.
This hands-on lab configures RA Guard and DHCPv6 Guard on switch ports to block rogue router advertisements and rogue DHCPv6 server responses, extending the IPv4 DHCP Snooping and DAI concepts covered earlier in this series into the IPv6 first-hop security domain.
This hands-on lab configures both traffic shaping and traffic policing on separate interfaces, comparing how each mechanism handles traffic exceeding its configured rate — shaping by buffering and delaying, policing by dropping or remarking outright.
This hands-on lab configures Weighted Random Early Detection on an outbound interface, verifying it begins probabilistically dropping lower-priority traffic before the queue fills completely, contrasting this proactive approach against tail drop's simpler reactive behavior.
This hands-on lab configures CBWFQ with three traffic classes receiving guaranteed minimum bandwidth allocations, verifying each class receives at least its configured share during congestion while a class-default queue absorbs unclassified traffic.
This hands-on lab combines the strict priority queuing covered in an earlier QoS lab with the CBWFQ bandwidth guarantees from the previous lab into a single Low Latency Queuing policy, verifying voice traffic receives immediate priority service while data classes still receive their guaranteed minimum shares.
This hands-on lab enables NBAR2 protocol discovery on a router interface, identifying application-layer traffic by signature rather than port number alone, then uses that classification directly within a QoS policy-map to prioritize a specific application.
This hands-on lab configures MACsec on a switch-to-switch link to encrypt all Layer 2 traffic crossing it, verifying frames are genuinely encrypted in transit and that a mismatched key prevents the link from passing traffic at all.
This hands-on lab configures the SGT Exchange Protocol (SXP) between two switches, allowing SGT-to-IP mapping information to reach a device that lacks the hardware capability to carry SGT tags inline, extending the SGT-based segmentation covered in an earlier lab across non-SGT-capable infrastructure.
This hands-on lab configures a switch to dynamically download its SGT name-to-number mappings from the ISE-equivalent policy server via Environment Data Download, verifying the switch stays synchronized with centrally managed SGT definitions without requiring local per-device configuration of every group name.
This hands-on lab configures two physical switches into a single logical StackWise Virtual switch using a dedicated Stackwise Virtual Link, verifying both members present as one control plane and that a member failure triggers predictable failover behavior.
This hands-on lab configures traditional Catalyst stacking (StackWise) across three switches using stack cables, contrasting its single-tier, chassis-proximity requirement against the StackWise Virtual pair covered in the previous lab, which allows switches to be located much farther apart.
