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Chapter 1

The Campus Network

Answers to Review Questions

D. A Cisco 6500 or 8500 switch is recommended at the core, and
even though only one of those switches might be sufficient to handle
the traffic, Cisco recommends two switches for redundancy and load
balancing. You could consider a 5500 Catalyst switch if you don't
need the power of the 6500 or the 8500. Because the customer is using
6500 at the distribution layer, you should use 8500s as the core
switches. D is the best answer.

C. The Catalyst 6000 can provide up to 384 10/100 Ethernet con-
nections, 192 100FX FastEthernet connections, and 130 Gigabit
Ethernet ports. Because there are 300 users, the 6000 series would be
a good fit. The 8500 is a recommended core switch, and the question
asks for an access layer/distribution layer solution.

A. A 5000 series switch may be overkill for the needs of the com-
pany. Because the question involves a small company and no growth
was specified, the 1900 would be the most cost-effective solution.

C. The 5500 can use a Route Switch Module (RSM) to provide layer
3 services to the internetwork. It also can provide a large amount of
ports per switch.

E. The core layer should be designed to connect distribution layer
devices. No packet manipulation should occur at this layer.

C, D. The core layer needs very fast switches to move data as quickly
as possible between distribution layer devices.

A. Routing protocols are protocols that are used to update routers
with network information. Routed protocols are used to send user
data through an internetwork.

A, B, D, F, G. Traffic patterns, the amount of routers, the number of
users connected into access layer switches, distance, and spanning tree
size are all factors that contribute to the amount of switches that can
collapse from the access layer to the distribution layer.

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