300-420 Exam Dumps : Designing Cisco Enterprise Networks

The correct BGP design is to attach the well-known No-Export community to the prefixes that should not be advertised beyond the service provider boundary. Cisco BGP communities are policy attributes that allow routes to carry instructions or classifications across BGP peers. The No-Export community tells a receiving BGP speaker not to advertise the route outside its confederation or autonomous system. That behavior is exactly what is needed when branch prefixes may be exchanged with the provider but must not be propagated to the public Internet. The No-Advertise community is stronger: it prevents the route from being advertised to any BGP peer, which may block reachability even where the provider still needs to know the route. NOPEER is used for route-server or peering policy control and is not the clean answer for excluding branch prefixes from Internet propagation. Setting a generic “Internet community” is not a standard solution by itself. The architect should also ensure that outbound prefix filters and provider-side community support are documented in the service agreement. Reference topics: BGP communities, No-Export, No-Advertise, provider edge filtering, Internet route policy.

Cisco SD-WAN uses Path MTU Discovery to avoid fragmentation problems across the overlay. SD-WAN traffic is encapsulated and encrypted, which adds overhead beyond the original packet size. If the effective path MTU is smaller than the encapsulated packet, fragmentation or packet loss can occur, especially when the DF bit is set or when intermediate devices block fragmentation-related ICMP messages. PMTUD allows devices to discover the largest packet size that can traverse the path without fragmentation and adjust forwarding behavior accordingly. Marking traffic with DF alone does not solve the issue; it may expose the problem by causing packets to be dropped when too large. Jumbo frames are not a universal WAN solution because service-provider, Internet, and broadband paths often do not support them consistently. Configuring every access circuit with a fixed 1600-byte MTU is not a reliable design assumption. The correct design is to rely on PMTUD and validate tunnel overhead, device MTU, TCP MSS adjustment where needed, and ICMP handling across transports. Reference topics: Cisco SD-WAN MTU, PMTUD, tunnel overhead, fragmentation avoidance, IPsec encapsulation.

In Cisco SD-Access, an intermediate node is an underlay transit device. Its responsibility is to provide IP reachability between fabric edge nodes, border nodes, and other fabric infrastructure roles. Intermediate nodes forward routed underlay traffic and do not perform endpoint registration, endpoint lookup, or VXLAN encapsulation for user traffic. Endpoint-to-location mapping is handled through the fabric control plane, which is based on LISP map-server and map-resolver functions. Fabric edge nodes identify connected endpoints, apply policy, act as anycast gateways, and encapsulate user traffic into VXLAN. Border nodes connect the fabric to external networks and handle traffic entering or leaving the fabric. The intermediate node is therefore comparable to a routed distribution or core transport device in a traditional hierarchical campus, except it is participating in the SD-Access underlay. It must provide stable Layer 3 reachability and appropriate MTU for encapsulated traffic but does not maintain the host tracking database or add security group information to VXLAN headers. The correct function is transporting IP packets between edge and border nodes.