There is a movement in the industry to combine the optical network and the routed network, with Cisco leading the charge. The architecture is known as RON, Routed Optical Networks. With the RON architecture, the services that Optical Engineers are accustomed to delivering within the optical network are now provided via the routed network. Services such as site-to-site traffic demand, path selection, and path protection. With this shift in architecture, there is a growing requirement for optical engineers' expertise to span both optical and routing. This lab is designed to demonstrate how the routed network delivers these services and how to configure a basic RON network using Segment Routing.

MPLS has been around for over two decades and is the cornerstone of Service Provider Networks and many enterprise, utility and federal networks. MPLS delivers mission-critical applications and services. Segment Routing has taken the stage to replace MPLS because it accomplishes the same as MPLS but is less complex, extremely robust and can be scaled without limitations. This lab will introduce you to the basics of Segment Routing.

Organizations rely on MPLS on multiple platforms to deliver mission-critical applications and services. Segment Routing is the next-generation evolution of traditional MPLS, and here we look at SR-MPLS and Traffic Engineering. We will perform distributed Traffic Engineering computations from the headend routers and utilize an SR PCE for centralized traffic engineering.

Organizations rely on MPLS on multiple platforms to deliver mission-critical applications and services. Segment Routing is the evolution of traditional MPLS, and here we look at SR-MPLS and Traffic Engineering across multiple domains with an SR-PCE (Path Computation Element). Traffic Engineering has been around for many years as RSVP-TE; however, being very cumbersome and complex, it has gained very little popularity with few deployments. Segment Routing Traffic Engineering adds a new dimension to Segment Routing including the ability to perform end-to-end traffic engineering across multiple IGP domains.

ISIS is the prevalent IGP routing protocol for multi-protocol routing with support for IPv4 and IPv6. As a link-state routing protocol, it supports fast convergence and fast reroute. Here we explore how easy it is to configure and verify ISIS.

SRv6 utilizes the IPv6 data plane natively to deliver Segment Routing capabilities which dramatically simplifies network deployments. By eliminating the need for MPLS label shims and transporting SRv6 SIDs as IPv6 addresses, any IPv6 capable router can forward an SRv6 packet. This means that you can run SRv6 services over any IPv6-enabled infrastructure. This lab will introduce you to the basics of SRv6 with L3VPN over a purely IPv6 transport.

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.