Before a core network can provide route services and traffic engineering, it must first establish basic transport connectivity between its nodes. In this course, you will learn how interior routing protocols are used to establish dynamic routing within the core, how MPLS technology is used to enhance packet transport across the underlay, and how Segment Routing is changing the way we think about transport paths. In each module you will watch a brief video describing the underlying technology and then walk through a hands-on lab to dive deeper into the relevant protocols and configurations that make underlay routing work.

Previously, the Cisco day 2 operations suite of MSO, NAE, NIR, and NIA ran separately on computing as a .ova in vSphere or on the APIC as an application. The architecture never allowed for sharing data between the apps or correlations with errors and telemetry views of packet loss. With the roadmap moving, we had applications and a shared data lake for all applications to draw from and correlate between application errors, changes to the policy, and deep flow telemetry, all visual as an epoch. For all the applications to run and have sharable databases, Cisco NEXUS Dashboard (ND) was created. The ND platform allows all the Cisco Day 2 apps and third-party applications to run on a single appliance. Secondly, the ND has to be an expandable CPU and storage-intensive platform; today, the platform can scale with 3 master nodes and 4 worker nodes with the apps and their data residing on the ND cluster. As ND matures, more ND servers can join the cluster, and they can be separated regionally if within TTL requirements to distribute applications and provide DR strategies.