Cisco NGFW Foundation Lab is a capability of the Advanced Technology Center (ATC) designed to provide an environment to gain hands-on experience with the fundamental features of the Cisco Secure Firewall solution. The environment that supports the lab is completely virtual, removing any hardware dependencies associated with physical infrastructure.

Nexus Dashboard provides a centralized platform to simplify the deployment, management, and extension of VXLAN EVPN fabrics. In this hands-on lab, you will start by onboarding devices, then configure vPCs, VRFs, and networks to enable segmentation and tenant connectivity. You'll also implement external route advertisement, route leaking between VRFs, and explore the roles of Border Gateways versus Border Gateway Spines. Finally, you'll integrate multiple fabrics into a Multi-Site Domain, building a scalable, distributed architecture. This lab demonstrates the value of Nexus Dashboard in providing centralized visibility, streamlining operations, and simplifying complex fabric management across sites.

Organizations have relied on IPv4 for decades, but transitioning from IPv4 to IPv6 is necessary to accommodate the growing number of devices and the increasing demand for IP addresses. Most organizations have exhausted their IPv4 address space. Transitioning to IPv6 allows network engineers to future-proof their networks against the inevitable exhaustion of IPv4 addresses.

Service providers and other large organizations rely on MPLS quite often on multiple platforms to deliver mission critical applications and services. Segment Routing is the next generation technology that replaces MPLS, and here we look at implementing L3VPN's with Segmenting Routing on both Cisco and Juniper Routers.

Service providers and other large organizations rely on MPLS on multiple platforms to deliver mission-critical applications and services. Segment Routing is the next-generation technology that replaces MPLS, and here we look at SR-MPLS along with an advanced feature called Flexible Algorithm (Flex-Algo). Segment Routing with Flex-Algo enables the router to assign a user-defined algorithm to the IGP that is implemented dynamically and on-demand.

This article provides a concise overview of the solution, including both hardware and software components.