This is a packet tracer campus network topology that we're gonna use in multiple videos in this course.
This topology gives us a nice basis to learn many of the technologies found in the CCNA exam.
This is a campus network consisting of two core switches and three access switches.
Even though this topology is quite small.
Imagine that you have many access switches in this topology configuring more than three access switches
is redundant and will simply take up time rather than you learning new things so I've limited the topology
to three access switches.
We've also got three PCs in the topology one connected to each access switch as well as a server connected
to one of the core switches.
We have an Internet router that will configure to connect the campus network to the Internet. On the
internet
we have a Google DNS server
8.8.8.8 and a cisco.com server. In the real world
if I ping google.com that DNS name needs to be resolved by a DNS server.
In my example, I'm using 8.8.8.8 as my DNS server.
So that is a Google DNS server and we'll replicate that in our packet tracer network.
Now there's a lot to do and hence we going to split up the configuration of this topology into multiple
videos.
You'll firstly need to power up the switches.
You'll have to configure basics such as hostnames IP addresses usernames and passwords and inter VLAN
routing on the core switches.
As this is a layer 2 topology you're going to need to configure the links between the switches as trunk
ports and the ports to the PCs as access ports.
The PCs in this network are in different VLANs.
PC 1 is in VLAN 10
PC 2 is in VLAN 20
and PC 3 is in VLAN 40, so you'll need to configure these ports on the access switches with the relevant
VLANs.
You'll also need to configure the server in VLAN 100 on this core switch.
In addition, because this is a layer 2 topology spanning tree is going to be used, spanning tree runs
by default on Cisco switches but it's not optimized.
You will need to optimize the spanning tree in this network.
You're going to configure the switch on the left as the route switch for some VLANs and the switch on
the right as the route switch for other VLANs. In the real world on your access switches, you may
have devices in multiple VLANs, so as an example you may have IP phones as well as PCs in your
topology and you're gonna wanna send some traffic to the call using this uplink and other traffic
to the core using this uplink.
So we're going to wanna optimize spanning tree for load sharing but also to ensure that we are not
blocking links that can negatively affect the throughput through our network.
As an example, if access switch 2 became the route it would mess up the forwarding of traffic through
the network.
So we need to optimize our spanning tree to make sure that the core switches are the route switches
and that we load share traffic across them.
We also gonna wanna make sure that these two links in the core are configured to use ether
channel so that both are forwarding rather than having one of the ports blocking.
We need to configure the core switches for inter VLAN routing so they're going to need multiple
switched virtual interfaces configured.
They're gonna have to be configured with routing protocols such as EIGRP so that they can exchange
routes with the ISR router.
The ISR router needs to be configured with basic configurations but it also needs to be configured with
EIGRP and net or network address translation to ensure that these devices in our network can get to
the internet. Now one of the things to think about when you have multiple core switches is which switch
becomes the default gateway for your PCs at the access layer.
We want multiple core switches for redundancy and for load sharing traffic across uplinks but which
switch will be the default gateway for this PC. If we configured the switch as the default gateway
and that switch went down
PC 1 wouldn't be able to send traffic to other VLANs.
So what we gonna wanna do in the core is enable protocols such as HSRP or hot standby running
protocol.
So we need to configure HSRP on our core network.
That means that rather than PC 1, PC 2, and PC 3 using one of the switches in the core as
the default gateway they point to the virtual HSRP router. If one of the core switches goes down
it's not a problem because traffic can be inter VLAN routed by the remaining core router. However
whenever you enable HSRP and you're using it
in addition to spanning tree, you're gonna wanna optimize the link between spanning tree and HS
RP.
In other words, if switch 1 is the HSRP primary router or master router for VLAN 10 you're gonna
want it to be the spanning tree route for VLAN 10.
In other words, you don't want a mismatch between your spanning-tree routes and your HSRP primary routers
or active routers if he's the HSRP active router for VLAN 10 he needs to be the route for VLAN 10 if
the switches the HSRP active router for VLAN 20 it needs to be the route for VLAN 20. So as you can see
there's a lot to do we're gonna configure some of the basics initially and then as we continue we'll
configure more and more to get this network fully working.
I'm hoping that this gives you a practical real world example of how to configure networks but in addition
I'm confident that it'll prepare you well for the CCNA exam so try and do the labs yourself.
Download the packet tracer files and see if you can complete the list of tasks yourself.
If you struggle or if you'd like to learn some additional tips and tricks watch my videos where I con
figure the devices.
Per the requirements given to us so let's get started configuring this campus network.