Arista ACE-S Campus study plan

Map each of the five exam domains to its weight and list the subtopics you cannot yet explain aloud

Describe how a leaf-spine campus fabric forwards traffic between access, distribution, and core layers

Explain EOS architecture in your own words, including the separation of control-plane state from protocol processes

Practice navigating the EOS CLI: enter config modes, commit changes, and compare running vs startup config

Compare spanning-tree and MLAG approaches to loop prevention and justify when each fits a campus design

Configure VLANs, trunk ports, and an SVI on a lab topology and verify forwarding

Explain how routing works at the campus boundary, including first-hop redundancy concepts

Trace a packet from an access port to an off-campus destination and write the decision points

Configure and verify at least three routing protocols or features relevant to campus edge connectivity

Explain how CloudVision relates to EOS devices and what state it holds versus what the device holds

Walk through device onboarding to CloudVision and identify the prerequisites

Compare change management via CLI versus via a central controller and list the risks of each

Describe the role of a cognitive campus in simplifying operations and name the telemetry sources it relies on

Differentiate campus switching platform tiers by positioning, port density, and typical deployment role

Explain how streaming telemetry differs from polling and why it matters for campus visibility

Build a small automation task that pushes a configuration change to a lab device and confirms the result

Explain network segmentation approaches on campus and when each is appropriate

Describe how authentication and access control are enforced at the campus edge

Identify the observability signals that would reveal a misconfigured access port

Sketch a segmented campus design with a guest, corporate, and IoT zone

Configure and verify an authentication method for wired access in the lab

Explain how a controller-based workflow can enforce consistent security policy across many devices

Describe how flow and telemetry data feed troubleshooting and anomaly detection

Write a troubleshooting runbook for a device that fails to authenticate

Revisit every domain and rank your weakest three subtopics by confidence

Re-derive the key design tradeoffs for each domain without notes

Complete timed practice across all domains and log every miss with a root cause

Close your top three gaps with targeted lab or reading time

Recite the core concepts of each domain in under five minutes each

Re-run your weakest labs from weeks 2, 3, and 6 without reference material

Review your error log and confirm each root cause is resolved

Simulate exam pacing with a full timed run and review only the misses