Cisco’s CCNP R&S track currently has 3 exams, ROUTE, SWITCH and TSHOOT. Pass all 3 exams and you will be CCNP R&S certified. I receive many questions from students asking what the best method is to study these exams and how to prepare themselves. In this article I’ll explain what you will encounter on the exams and the best way to pass the exams.
The Virtual Switching System (VSS) allows two Cisco Catalyst 6500 or 4500 chassis to bond together so that is seen as a single virtual swich to the rest of the network. Other devices will see the VSS configured 6500 as a single device which means it’s possible to use multi chassis etherchannel and protocols like spanning-tree will only see a single switch.
Some other features are NSF (Non Stop Forwarding) / SSO (Stateful Switchover) which means that when a single chassis fails the other one will take over without any downtime since the routing table / CEF table etc. are stored in both chassis’ supervisors.
Another cool feature is EFSU (Enhanced Fast Software Upgrade) which allows you to upgrade the IOS version without any downtime.
In this tutorial I will be using two Cisco Catalyst 6504 switches with 720-10G VSS supervisors to show you how to configure VSS and verify that it’s working.
