300-420 Exam Dumps : Designing Cisco Enterprise Networks

The Cisco SD-Access data plane is based on VXLAN. Cisco SD-Access separates the fabric into functional planes: the underlay provides IP reachability, the control plane uses LISP to map endpoints to locations, and the data plane uses VXLAN encapsulation to carry user traffic across the routed underlay. VXLAN allows the fabric edge node to encapsulate endpoint traffic and forward it through the fabric while preserving virtual network and segmentation information. This is what enables SD-Access to provide Layer 2 and Layer 3 overlay services over a Layer 3 routed transport. OMP is the control-plane protocol for Cisco SD-WAN, not SD-Access. NHRP is associated with DMVPN tunnel resolution. LISP is essential in SD-Access, but its role is endpoint ID to routing locator mapping, not packet encapsulation in the data plane. Therefore, VXLAN is the correct protocol for the SD-Access data plane. Reference topics: SD-Access fabric, VXLAN data plane, LISP control plane, overlay encapsulation, routed underlay.

Root guard is the correct feature when the design must allow switches to be attached for testing but prevent those switches from influencing the spanning-tree root placement. Cisco root guard protects the intended STP root by placing a port into a root-inconsistent state if superior BPDUs are received on a port where the root should never appear. This directly addresses the risk created by rogue or lab switches connected by end users: if a user switch advertises a better bridge priority, the production access topology is not allowed to reconverge around that unauthorized device. BPDU guard is usually used on PortFast edge ports to err-disable a port that receives any BPDU, which is excellent for strict host-only ports but less aligned with the wording that users may connect their own switches for testing. Loop guard protects root or alternate ports from losing BPDUs and accidentally forwarding. BPDU skew detection is a diagnostic feature, not the correct design control. Therefore, root guard is the appropriate protection against rogue switches affecting STP topology. Reference topics: STP root placement, root guard, superior BPDUs, campus Layer 2 protection.

Implementing network summarization on the edge routers is the correct EIGRP design action to reduce query range and improve convergence. In EIGRP, when a route is lost and no feasible successor exists, DUAL sends queries to neighbors. If the network is large or poorly summarized, those queries can propagate widely and increase convergence time. Hierarchical addressing allows each office or edge block to advertise a summary instead of many specific prefixes. If a specific subnet inside an office fails, the summary can remain stable toward the rest of the network, preventing the failure from triggering unnecessary queries across the dark-fiber interoffice topology. Stub routing can also reduce query scope, but the option says to configure stub areas on non-edge routers, which is not the right EIGRP terminology or placement. Different EIGRP processes add redistribution complexity, and route filtering alone does not provide the same clean convergence boundary as summarization. Reference topics: EIGRP summarization, DUAL query scope, hierarchical addressing, convergence optimization, dark-fiber campus routing.