This course combines Cisco BGP with the Implementing Cisco MPLS course into an intense one-week workshop. A deep understanding of BGP is required to understand and support MPLS. A Cisco Certified Systems Instructor who is also a CCIE and has extensive experience with BGP and MPLS teaches this customized workshop. Approximately half the course will be spent on core BGP skills, followed by an overview of MPLS.
Prerequisites
- The class assumes students have a good understanding of the operation and configuration of Interior Routing Protocols especially OSPF and EIGRP.
Objectives
Upon completion of this course students will be able to:
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) objectives:
- Understand the differences between BGP and interior routing protocols
- Understand the BGP decision algorithm
- Configure and establish BGP neighbors
- Understand the concepts and challenges of multi-homing
- Configure BGP multi-homing with redundancy
- Perform BGP traffic management tasks for load splitting
- Understand Autonomous Systems
- Understand iBGP and eBGP operation
- Understand BGP attributes
- Manipulate inbound and outbound traffic flow
- Understand concepts and challenges of redundancy for a corporation with multiple Internet connections
- Understand and configure Local Preference and MED attributes
- Understand Loop avoidance concepts in BGP
- Understand and configure BGP next hop behavior
- Control Prefix advertisement and receipt
- Configure and utilize BGP Communities to change traffic flow to and from ISPs and between ISPs.
- Configure ISP routers for BGP connectivity to customers and to other ISPs
Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) objectives:
- Describe basic MPLS frame-mode architectures and identify how it supports applications that are used to address the drawbacks in traditional IP routing
- Describe the Label Distribution Protocol (LDP) process by explaining label allocation, label distribution, label retention, label convergence and Penultimate Hop Popping (PHP) in both frame and cell modes
- Given a diagram of a typical MPLS network solution, identify the Cisco IOS command syntax required to successfully configure and monitor MPLS operations on frame mode.
- Describe MPLS's peer-to-peer architecture and explain the routing and packet forwarding model in this architecture.
*Additional topics can be covered as time permits.
Students receive BGP courseware as well as Implementing Cisco MPLS v2.3 (MPLS) courseware.
This is a very “hands-on” course as each major topic is supported by well-designed and pertinent lab exercises. All lab exercises build on each other, as would be the case in a real BGP/ MPLS implementation. The labs get more and more complex and rely on the success of previous labs to succeed, therefore emphasizing and reviewing critical material from prior chapters. The students become familiar and comfortable with the primary configuration tools and the conceptual techniques of manipulating BGP through continued use of the techniques in increasingly complex labs. The Instructor provides one-on-one assistance as needed to ensure all students are successful in the lab exercises.
Lectures are creative, entertaining, and presented in a well-thought out order that best helps the student grasp the complexities of BGP and MPLS by learning the concepts in a layer-by-layer approach.
The instructor for this class, Larry Mobley, CCIE # 9175, is an internetworking consultant and has been a certified Cisco instructor since 1995. Larry Mobley has presented this class around the world to networking professionals in numerous industries and has conducted private offerings of this course to System Engineers from several companies including Cisco systems.
