The Challenge Operating a network can be a daunting task. Especially when you find yourself manually repeating ordinary work on a regular basis. As a network engineer you are likely to enjoy challenges with protocols and designs rather than unboxing, mounting, and installing hardware. The time spent on this everyday work should be kept at a minimum. In a streamlined network design, the configuration of new equipment should be based on a template with few variables, such as hostname and IP addressing.

Introduction ISIS is the routing protocol preferred for SD-Access (SDA). Roughly said, SDA is somewhat similar to routed access. We can think of fabric edge nodes as access switches when comparing them to our traditional flat networks. Many companies buy multiple switches and deploy them in stacks using Cisco StackWise technology. This has the usual benefits of stacking, namely collapsing all of the switches in the stack into just one management and control plane.

Unfortunately not all Cisco platforms support SDA. Cisco has chosen these platforms to be extended by SDA to be able to offer both a desktop platform and IoT platforms: 3560CX IE 3300 IE 3400 IE 3400H IE 4000 series IE 5000 series Catalyst Digital Building NOTE! If you plan on using policy, meaning micro segmentation using SGTs, only IE 3400 and IE 3400H are supported as policy extended nodes!