[music]
Okay, so now we're done with Prepare. Now we're
moving into Plan, so here's the definition of Plan. The
items here in red are the ones that we're going to
focus on here. So based on your goals and your
facilities in which case your facility is your house
or your home-based office or wherever you're planning on
putting this Lab. And what's the operational environment
that can support this proposed system. So let's go
into each one of these in more detail and break these
out. Let's start out with Goals. So as it mentions
here, for each protocol that you selected in the Prepare
stage like Frame Relay, like Multiple Spanning Tree, for
each of those protocols like Private VLANs, right here in
the Plan stage you're going to want to draw a diagram
just on a piece of paper or something, showing the
minimum quantity of interfaces and the minimum
quantity of chassis that you'll need to play with
that protocol. Here is an example. Let's say that you
say to yourself, Okay, for the CCNA and the CCNP
they're still testing me on frame relay. So I would like
to include frame relay as part of my home base lab.
Okay, so you think to yourself, what's the minimum
quantity of interfaces and what's the minimum quantity
of chassis I could get away with and still practice
frame relay? And here is three ideas. Topology number
1, you could actually have two routers connected back
to back and do frame relay. So technically speaking that
is the minimum you could get away with to do frame relay.
Take it up a notch to topology number 2, put a
frame relay switch in the middle. Now, certainly
you're not going to buy like a real frame relay switch.
What I'm talking about here that device in the middle is
another Cisco router, so we're talking now about
three routers, but the router in the middle is
configured via IOS to act like a Cisco switch. So
we've increased our chassis requirement a little bit
here. Or Topology #3. Have a total of four devices.
You've got your three routers on the edge, and
then you got your router in the middle, serving as the
Frame Relay Switch. Now any one of these three
topologies here will support Frame Relay. Personally, I
recommend the third topology. Now it's going to
cost you a little bit more money, because obviously
you've got a total of four devices here as opposed to
two on the top. But one of the things I want to
emphasize is as you're designing your lab, as
you're coming up with what you want, at the very top of
the list, the things you want to think about is:
scalability, scalability, scalability. You want to
build a lab that you can recable, and tweak, and come
up with all kinds of different topologies. Yeah,
topology number 1 will support frame relay, but
it's not going to support a whole lot else. You've only
got two interfaces and two routers. You don't have a
lot of flexibility in what else you can do with that
topology. Look at topology number 3 right there. Why is
that so much better in my reasoning? Well, a couple
things - number one, by having the router in the
middle operating as a frame relay switch, or basically
by having three routers, three routers is always
better than two routers, right? With 3 routers you
can come up with more complex routing topologies
and stuff than you could ever do with two routers.
You're going to want to do-- that router in the middle is
operating as a frame relay switch. Once you're done
with frame relay, you can convert that back into just
a regular Layer 3 router. Now you've got four routers
to play with, which will give you the ability to do a
lot more complex route filtering, route
summarization topologies, now how are you going to do
route filtering and route summarization with topology
number 1. You probably can, but you're really limited.
Topology number 2, yeah, now you got three devices.
What's some of the other benefits of topology number
three? For example, with the frame relay switch there in
the middle you could practice things like well
let's see here what if the PVC from R1 to R2 becomes
inactive or deleted? The other PVC from R1 to R3 is
still good. It's still active. It's still usable
PVC. You could play around with that and see how's my
routing protocol going to react? How's it going to
dynamically change when a PVC going to one physical
chassis now becomes unusable, and the PVC going
to another chassis is now the preferred path? Can't
really do that if you've only got router 1 and router
2. I'm sure if we thought about it we could think of a
lot of other benefits of having topology number 3
right here. That's just frame relay. What if we're
talking about switching? Okay, Layer 2 switching -
topology number 1, just one switch. Yeah, you can
practice things like VLANs. If that's a multilayer
switch you could configure SVIs on there and practice
routing between directly connected SVIs, so there's
some stuff you can do. Topology number 2 is better,
because now with two switches you can practice
things like EtherChannels. Now you could practice
Spanning-Tree VLAN load balancing - can't do that
with topology number 1. But of course, I recommend
topology number 3, because with 3 switches you've got a
lot more variability and things like-- well, how
about multiple Spanning-Tree? One of the things that's
really cool to play around with, with MST, is how does
my MST region communicate with another
switch that's not running MST. How's an MST region
talk to PVST switches or just RSTP switches? Can't
really do that if you've just got two switches. With
three switches you've got a lot more variability, you
can do a complex load balancing with spanning
tree, with just all sorts of other things you can do. So
once again, it's your choice, you could probably
get by with just policy number two but you're going
to have so much more flexibility if you go with
policy number three. So what you're doing here in the
plan stages for each protocol that you listed,
private VLANs, DHCP snooping, BGP. You're
drawing diagrams for yourself and you're
thinking, Okay, what is the minimum topology I could
draw? Could I do this feature with just two
devices? With just three devices? What's the minimum
I can create where I can practice this thing? Because
the end result is you're trying to avoid buying
unnecessary equipment. Why purchase 6 routers if you
can get away with 4? You're not going to know that
unless you draw these pictures first. That's what
you're trying to do in the plan stage. Another thing
about planning is facilities. A lot of people
don't really think about this when they're developing
a home-based lab. This is equally important. Do you
have the physical space to house a rack or a stack of
equipment on your desk? We talked about this. Is your
office totally cluttered? Are you sharing your office
with your wife, and with your teenage son, and
there's just no room in there to put this stuff? Do
you have enough power in your room to support your
proposed rack? Do you have enough free electrical
outlets? Do you have circuit breakers that won't trip?
I'm going to talk, in just a second here, about that. How
will you cool yourself and the equipment? When you turn
on these routers and switches they generate a lot
of heat. Their fan's pumping out a lot of heat, which is
great if this is the wintertime, but in the
summertime, when it's 95 degrees outside, you're
going to be sweating like crazy. How are you going to
prevent yourself from having to go down to a loincloth in
your office because it's just so hot in there as
you're running these seven or eight pieces of
equipment? Will the noise be a problem? Some of these
routers and switches, when you turn them on it sounds
like an airplane engine going off. They are so
incredibly loud. Is that going to be a problem? If
you take a lot of conference calls and stuff from your
office, or like I said, if your home office is shared
with your wife or your son who's on the phone a lot, or
you spend a lot of time like this, watching and listening
to video chats or conferences or stuff, is
this going to be a problem, the noise? Something else
you have to think about. Let's talk about the
electrical for a second. What I'm about to go into
here, for those of you who are homeowners or who have
previously been homeowners, you probably already know
this stuff. But there's probably those of you who
are watching, who are just, you know, who've never owned
a home. Maybe your entire life experience is living in
an apartment. And you've never had to deal with
circuit breakers, or electrical boxes. And this
is something you just don't really think about. So,
every electrical outlet in your home, leads back to a
circuit breaker somewhere. And typically, one circuit
breaker will control multiple wall outlets. A lot
of times, a single circuit breaker in your garage, or
somewhere on your wall. That one circuit breaker will
control an entire room. Or maybe 2 or 3 rooms. And what
are those circuit breakers there for? Why are they
created? Well they're there to prevent fires. They will
automatically trip, they will turn off, they will
stop the power to all those electrical outlets, if they
determine there's too much suction. If there's too much
power trying to be drawn from those electrical
outlets. And that can happen if I take one wall outlet.
Just one, and I plug in like a string of three power
strips, and I plug nine devices in there, three
routers and six switches or something. Yeah, that's
probably going to draw so much power from that one
outlet it's going to trip my circuit breaker. So that's
one of our goals here, is prevent that. How do we
prevent that from happening? So step number 1, if you
can, ideally power your devices from more than one
circuit breaker. This can be kind of hard to do, because
in most peoples homes and apartments, all the
electrical outlets within a single room usually feedback
to a single circuit breaker. But if you're one of the
lucky people where that's not the case, where the
outlet on this wall and the outlet on this wall lead to
two different circuit breakers, fantastic. Plug in
a power strip that feeds three of your routers
powered by this one, another three routers powered by
this one, so try divide it up. Or if your spouse
doesn't mind, run a long extension cable out of your
office into the living room, or into the bathroom, or
something. But the idea is to try to divvy up the load
among more than a single circuit breaker. You should
know in advance how much power is each one of your
routers and switches going to draw, and this is where
you're going to need to dig into the datasheets of that
to find out. And then, and I will not take credit for
this. I actually got this from this Tech Republic
website right here. This is a nifty formula that someone
came up with that says based on your circuit - at least
in the United States. I can't speak to people in
other parts of the world, but at least in the United
States, most of our circuit breakers in our house are
20-amp circuits, and they feed with 120 volts. So here
in the U.S. if you follow this formula, you can see
right here it basically says at the bottom, Okay, so for
that single circuit breaker, it will handle a maximum of
1920 watts. Now you look at your data sheets and you
say, okay, well if I got 6 routers and 4 switches on
this one circuit breaker, will that exceed this? Also,
keep in mind also that many times in your house circuit
breakers are powering other things. It can be very
irritating if you're running your lab and all of a sudden
somebody goes in the kitchen, turns on the
microwave, and boop, all the lights go out, because now,
that just exceeded your wattage. This is also
something people that sometimes don't think about
is not only do I have enough power in these one, or two,
or three outlets, but the circuit breaker that's
feeding those outlets, what else is it powering? Is it
powering my washing machine and my dryer? Is it powering
my microwave? You got to think about these things as
well. When you're done with the planning stage, what's
the end result of this? The end result is, you've come
up now with a variety of drawings, a variety of
network topologies that will support your various
features. You've got in front of you 10, 12, 15
pages of various router and switch drawings that maybe
you can collapse all into one diagram. You can say,
okay, based on all this, I've now determined that
with four routers and two switches, I can do
everything I need to do. That's the end result of
plan, is you've got one final drawing topology
diagram. So you've got a thorough understanding of
how many chassis you're going to need, how many
routers, how many switches, how many interfaces you're
going to need. You know, I'm going to need a total of six
fast Ethernet interfaces, I'm going to need a total of
four serial interfaces. You should know that by the time
you're done with this. You're going to know how
many extraneous devices you need. We haven't really
talked about that, but you're probably going to
want to also purchase things like hubs and laptops. So
you want to integrate a server, a real server, into
your rack, that's something you'll have to think about.
By the time you're done with this, you'll know that. How
many non-Cisco things am I going to need to incorporate
into this rack, hubs, PCs, servers, cables, things like
that? Lastly, by the time you're done with the plan
stage, you have confidence that your facility, which is
your home, will support the electrical requirements of
this rack that you planned to build. That's the end
result of the plan stage. Let me just take a quick
moment here to see what questions there are before I
continue on. So Carlo asked if this was going to be
uploaded to YouTube later on? Excuse me. I don't know
about that. For this particular session, probably
not. This session will probably only be
available on INE's streaming.ine.com website. I
don't think they plan on making this as one of the
free videos on YouTube. I could be wrong about that,
but I don't think so. Someone's asking about the
CCNP route workbook. That's just going to be completed
over time. My goal is, over the next six to nine months
I will continually add tasks to that here and there. I've
just added some OSPF tasks to it, I plan on adding more
OSPF. Over time I'll add BGP and service level agreements
and stuff like that. But, it's an ongoing work in
progress, so it's going to be a few months before
that's done. TSHOOT will also be the same thing. I do
plan on coming out with a TSHOOT workbook, but just
like the route workbook, when that first comes out it
will probably have somewhere between three to five tasks
where you troubleshoot a typology and then it will
build over time on top of that. Someone was asking do
we have a copy of the virtual software available
for the CCIE lab on INE's website? No, we don't.
That's not available on our website. Yes, this will be
available on demand. Actually, I was told by our
producer that it's probably only going to be about a
week, if that, before this is available. I previously
said like two to three weeks, apparently he thinks
he'll be able to get it out much quicker than that, so
there we go. Steve, you asked a good question. What
about end devices and traffic in the network for
testing? Yeah, exactly, so this is also one of the
things you want to think about during this plan stage
is what kind of traffic do I plan on creating to test
this? For example, let's think about routing
protocols. If you want to practice some complex route
filtering and route summarization you probably
want to have a minimum of 10 or more networks being
advertised from 1 router to the other. Well, how do you
get that to happen? Easiest way is probably just to
create a bunch of loopbacks. Or to read a bunch of static
routes and redistribute them. What about actual data
traffic? You know, Telnet traffic, where you can
always initiate the Telnet from a router. But what if
you want to have traffic flowing through your home
lab. Which is traffic that routers themselves and
switches can't really create, like email traffic.
Or, I don't know, web browsing traffic, or
something like that. Well, if that's your desire, then
you're going to have to think about, Okay, then I'm
probably going to have a minimum of 2 end devices
connected to my Rack. So maybe part of your budget
is, what's the cheapest laptop I can find? You know,
can I find a-- or maybe not even a laptop, right?
There's a lot of desktop PCs that people bought four/five
years ago that they're now selling on eBay for probably
25 or 50 bucks. You don't need a laptop to generate
e-mail traffic or whatever, buy a real cheap desktop PC
that's not even sold anymore someone selling for like
25 bucks, great usage of something you can connect to
your rack to generate traffic. There's also tools
you can download for free, a software where you can
download, where you can generate traffic for all
kinds of stuff. For example, I don't know if I have it
here on this laptop. Yes, I do so I'll put it over here.
So this here-- let me open it up. I don't use it a lot,
but this is called the Colasoft Packet Builder. I
got this for free, don't have to pay anything. Let me
just move it over a little bit, but this is an awesome
tool. You can use this to build streams of traffic and
you've got full control over your streams of traffic. You
can generate-- you can tell it how fast you want that
traffic to go and Bits per second or Bytes per second.
You can tell it what type of traffic do I want ARP's
DHCP. You can even get into individual fields and tweak
like the hexadecimal of individual fields, all for
free. So this is a great thing to install in your
laptop and now turn your laptop into a traffic
generator, so going to want to think about that as well,
yes. So do I need actual physical devices? And if so,
how many of them which I'm going to connect to my
network and pump traffic through it? That's going
to be something you're going to want to come up with
at the end of this Plan stage right here.
[music]