Service Provider General Tasks

As you may now, CCIE Service Provider has been updated to new version (V.3) as of April 18 2011. There are several changes in the exam which are very important, ATM seems to be removed and IOS XR has a major role along with more IPv6 plus extended troubleshooting section. I went through my preparation notes and found best practices note which is general rule of thumb for CCIE SP lab.

General Best Practices for exam:

• Configure ISIS or OSPF backbone in each AS (Loopback reach-ability)

configure loopback0 as router-id
configure metric parameters (e.g. auto-cost reference-bandwidth / metric-style wide)
configure network types / is-types
configure timers or protocol specific features, DR priority and so on.

• Configure BGP in each AS (to advertise loopbacks to other AS)

configure "no bgp default ipv4-unicast"
configure neighbors remote-as
configure update-source as loopback0
configure address-family ipv4 and activate neighbors (and RR if necessary)
configure next-hop-self on border-routers (if necessary)
advertise loopback address with the network command

• Configure eBGP neighbors

make sure you have advertised loopback addresses
make sure next-hop is propagated correctly
set "ip bgp-community new-format"
send bgp communities to required neighbors
configure routing policies/controls based on community lists

• Configure MPLS Tagging

configure label protocol
configure loopback as ldp session source - router-id
configure label options (numbers, session protection, etc)
configure mpls interfaces

• Configure MPLS TE

configure routers for MPLS TE
configure OSPF/ISIS for MPLS TE 
configure routing area for MPLS TE (or Level1/2)
configure interfaces for TE and RSVP
configure tunnel interfaces
configure static or dynamic paths

• Configure MPLS VPN

configure VRFs and try to import RTs
configure MP-IBGP
configure MP-eBGP
configure send-label in BGP (if required)
configure next-hop-unchanged (between MP-eBGP points if necessary)

• Configure Route control in MPLS VPN

set BGP attributes to control routes. e.g:
send MED to MP-BGP CE neighbor (to make it less preferred)
set Weight for a neighbor in different AS to be preferred

 

For a detailed Lab exam blue print you can refer to:
https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/docs/DOC-10145