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.

The Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Foundations 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 Cisco's SD-WAN solution. The environment that supports the lab is completely virtual, removing any hardware dependencies associated with physical infrastructure.

This lab guide is intended for administrators who are responsible for deploying and configuring Cisco IOS-XE solutions. Participants should have at least a basic understanding of WLAN concepts. It is assumed that participants have at least a working understanding of fundamental wireless concepts as well as Cisco technology.

The Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN 20.9.x Sandbox is a capability of the ATC designed to provide an environment to gain hands-on experience with the latest features in the Cisco SD-WAN solution. Within this lab version, every Edge participating in the SD-WAN fabric is a Catalyst 8000V. The environment that supports the Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN 20.9.x Sandbox is completely virtual, removing any hardware dependencies associated with physical infrastructure.

This lab will demonstrate how the Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller can easily set up an AI/ML fabric with a simple point-and-click GUI. It will only do this easily without knowing the protocols or best practices. The controller will do the work.

NVIDIA Blueprints: PDF Ingestion, also known as NVIDIA-Ingest, or NV-Ingest, this blueprint is a scalable, performance-oriented document content and metadata extraction microservice. Including support for parsing PDFs, Word and PowerPoint documents, it uses specialized NVIDIA NIM microservices to find, contextualize, and extract text, tables, charts and images for use in downstream generative applications.

MPLS has been used for over two decades. It is the cornerstone of Service Provider Networks and many enterprise, utility and federal networks. MPLS delivers mission-critical applications and services. This lab provides a hands-on lab environment that will familiarize the user with the primary routing configuration of MPLS (Multi-protocol Label Switching) with LDP (Label Distribution Protocol) running on Cisco routers.

This lab is the Cisco ACI Fundamentals Lab Part 1, and after completion, the student can launch Cisco ACI Fundamentals Lab Part 2 to complete the entire lab. The lab uses the ACI virtual simulator based on ACI Version 6, emulating an APIC, 2 leafs, and a spine. Part 2 uses a shared physical ACI fabric to complete the policy and verify data plane connectivity. The ACI Virtual Simulator was needed to demo the building of the ACI fabric from scratch, bootstrapping the APIC, adding the spine and leafs, fabric discovery, and completing VMM integration. Since the Cisco ACI Fundamentals Lab, Part 2 is a shared on-demand environment, to decouple the APIC build process from the APIC policy creation. Due to limitations, the virtual ACI fabric is a control plane-only simulator, and no data plane testing (Ping, SSH) can get done for validation. Cisco ACI Fundamentals Lab Part 2 uses a Tenant inside of a physical ACI, and data plane functionality can get tested ( Ping, SSH)

This Sandbox environment features a pre-configured network topology designed to showcase the diverse capabilities of the Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN solution. The incorporated set of components within the lab topology include Controllers and IOS-XE WAN Edges (Catalyst 8000V), all running on 20.12.3.1/17.12.3a code.

NVIDIA DGX H100 integration and validation environment for enterprise AI workflows.

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.

This lab will enable a student to build a basic multi-site fabric using Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC) for complete end-to-end connectivity.