Design Methodologies (15%)
- Describe the Cisco Design lifecycle – PBM (plan, build, manage)
- Describe the information required to characterize an existing network as part of the planning for a design change
- Describe the use cases and benefits of network characterization tools (SNMP, NBAR, NetFlow)
- Compare and contrast the top-down and bottom-up design approaches
Design Objectives (20%)
- Describe the importance and application of modularity in a network
- Describe the importance and application of hierarchy in a network
- Describe the importance and application of scalability in a network
- Describe the importance and application of resiliency in a network
- Describe the importance and application of concept of fault domains in a network
Addressing and Routing Protocols in an Existing Network (20%)
- Describe the concept of scalable addressing
- Hierarchy
- Summarization
- Efficiency
- Design an effective IP addressing scheme
- Subnetting
- Summarization
- Scalability
- NAT
- Identify routing protocol scalability considerations
- Number of peers
- Convergence requirements
- Summarization boundaries and techniques
- Number of routing entries
- Impact of routing table of performance
- Size of the flooding domain
- Topology
- Design a routing protocol expansion
- IGP protocols (EIGRP, OSPF, ISIS)
- BGP (eBGP peering, iBGP peering)
Enterprise Network Design (20%)
- Design a basic campus
- Layer 2/Layer 3 demarcation
- Spanning tree
- Ether channels
- First Hop Redundancy Protocols (FHRP)
- Chassis virtualization
- Design a basic enterprise network
- Layer 3 protocols and redistribution
- WAN connectivity
- Topologies (hub and spoke, spoke to spoke, point to point, full/partial mesh)
- Connectivity methods (DMVPN, get VPN, MPLS Layer 3 VPN, Layer 2 VPN, static IPsec, GRE,VTI)
- Resiliency (SLAs, backup links, QoS)
- Connections to the data center
- Edge connectivity
- Internet connectivity
- ACLs and firewall placements
- NAT placement
- Design a basic branch network
- Redundancy
- Connectivity
- Hardware
- Service provider
- Link capacity
- Bandwidth
- Delay
- Redundancy
Considerations for Expanding an Existing Network (25%)
- Describe design considerations for wireless network architectures
- Physical and virtual controllers
- Centralized and decentralized designs
- Identify integration considerations and requirements for controller-based wireless networks
- Traffic flows
- Bandwidth consumption
- AP and controller connectivity
- QoS
- Describe security controls integration considerations
- Traffic filtering and inspection
- Firewall and IPS placement and functionality
- Identify traffic flow implications as a result of security controls
- Client access methods
- Network access control
- Identify high-level considerations for collaboration (voice, streaming video, interactive video) applications
- QoS (shaping vs. policing, trust boundaries, jitter, delay, loss)
- Capacity
- Convergence time
- Service placement
- Describe the concepts of virtualization within a network design
- Identify network elements that can be virtualized
- Physical elements (chassis, VSS, VDC, contexts)
- Logical elements (routing elements, tunneling, VRFs, VLANs)
- Describe the concepts of network programmability within a network design
- APIs
- Controllers
- Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)
- Describe data center components
- Server load balancing basics
- Blocking vs. non-blocking Layer 2
- Layer 2 extension
Source: https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/community/certifications/ccda/desgn/exam-topics