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.

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

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.

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.

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.