Implementing Cisco IP Switched Networks (Exam 642-813 SWITCH) Course

Welcome into the CCNP Switch Certification Course. I'm Greg Dickinson and we're going to spend the next few hours together going over all aspects of CCNP Level Switching and hopefully by the end of this, you'll have the foundation knowledge necessary to practice and pass the CCNP Switching exam. This is the introduction and prerequisites video and basically in this video we're going to introduce you to the CCNP Switching exam. We'll talk a little bit about how this exam has changed from the old CISCO BCMSN or the Building Cisco Multi-Layer Switched Networks exam which is the old CCNP Switching exam. And we'll wind up talking about some of the prerequisites you'll need to do well in your studies for the CCNP Switching exam. Now if you're taking this course you probably realize that this particular exam is one of three exams required for the CCNP or the Cisco Certified Network Professional Certification. The first is obviously this exam the 642-813 Switch exam. The second is the 642-902 Route exam and the last is the 642-832 T Shoot or Troubleshooting exam. Now you can take Route and Switch in whatever order appeals to you, I did Route first, mainly because in my day job I deal with network monitoring and network management of a large WAN. And so a lot of the routing concepts just came naturally to me. Of course, you don't necessarily need to do routing first, you could do switching first. However, I would recommend you do Troubleshooting last out of the three exams, just simply because it's hard to talk about how to troubleshoot a campus LAN or a Wide Area Network, if you don't know the foundation concepts to troubleshoot said infrastructure. And Cisco's purpose with the CCNP Switching exam is to validate that you know basic and advanced switching topics. Now not too overly advanced, they're saving the really advanced stuff for the CCIE and for some of the other certification tracks. But they've changed the CCNP Switch exam a little bit to introduce some of the more advanced concepts into it, we'll talk about that on the next slide. So I know some of you maybe asking what are the changes from the BCMSN exam? Perhaps you have a CCNP now and you're looking to take the Switch exam to renew your CCNP Certification. Or maybe you're getting your CCNP for the first time and you happen to have studied the BCMSN exam and then through whatever reason, life changes or procrastination you just never took the old exam before it expired. And the short answer about the changes from the BCMSN exam is that there's not many. You're still going to have to know about LAN technologies. You're going to have to know Spanning Tree and Rapid Spanning Tree, EtherChannel Trunking, Layer 2 and Layer 3 Switching. In my estimation 95 percent of the material from the old BCMSN exam is still valid in the Switch exam because again, switching technology at least from Cisco's world hasn't changed that much in about the past decade or so. Now that's not to say that Cisco hasn't introduced new concepts and new technologies to make your local network a lot more redundant and a lot more highly available. But the basic foundations, Spanning Tree and everything, Spanning Tree been around for 20, 30 years and it's not going to change anytime soon. There's just too much inertia in the industry and I think it's a good thing because Spanning Tree works very, very well for what it's designed to do. Cisco did add several topics to the BCMSN exam to make the new Switch exam. The first and the most notable is they added voice and video and they didn't get into a whole lot of detail with voice and video. Basically there's a little blurb in the exam topics that says you need to be able to prepare your LAN for the implementation of a voice and a video in a wireless infrastructure. But they don't really talk you through loading up Call Manager and setting up phones and all that other stuff because again, that's part of the CCNA and CCNP Voice Certification. They also added wireless as I mentioned in the previous bullet point and a lot of the wireless topics are what you studied for the CCNA exam and we're going to reuse some of those concepts and add onto them and go a little deeper. But again, we're not going to go into a whole lot of detail for wireless other than, how does it work, how would you set it up on your network, what some of the things you have to consider when you're adding a wireless infrastructure to your network. The big thing they added and the big thing in my opinion anyways, is they added High Availability, that's HSRP, VRRP and GLBP and those may just be alphabet soup to you at this point. I know when I first started studying the CCNP Switching about a year ago, I saw those topics and I'm like oh man, what is this? I've never even touched that, I've seen it in production, but I've never set it up, it was just all those kind of words. We'll go over how that works and how to set it up, it's a really cool technology in my opinion. They also added a section on network management, basically SNMP and IPSLA. We touched on both of those topics in the CCNA but it was more just, hey what do these do? You didn't really have to go and configure them and make them work, we'll actually set them up on switches in the CCNP Switch exam. They also changed the QoS, the QoS Marking to just use Auto QoS. Instead of getting all in depth in QoS, they just said here's how you set up Auto QoS on the new versions of switches and all of this in-depth QoS Marking stuff, we're going to move out to a different exam. So what's some of the prerequisites that you'd have to have to get the most out of this course. The first is you'd have to have a CCNA or equivalent knowledge. Again I'm not going to reinvent the wheel on this course, we've got a long way to go and a short time to get there, to steal a phrase. You have to know how to do basic switch configuration, basic routing for when we talk about RIP and EIGRP and other Layer 3 routing topics. You also have to have access to switch hardware and that's because you can't emulate a switch in GNS3 like we did for the CCNP Routing exam. What you'd need is a 3550 or 3560 for a Layer 3 Switch to do your High Availability and other topics like that. As low as a 2950 or a 2960 as just a dumb Layer 2 Switch and we've got all of those in our lab that we're going to be using and you'll get to see the interface all of them and get real familiar with them by the end of this course. And that covers are introduction and prerequisites to the CCNP Switching exam prep.