Aruba ACDA study guide
Aruba ACDA · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Aruba Certified Design Associate (ACDA) is an entry-level credential for people who translate business and technical requirements into campus and branch network designs using Aruba switching, wireless, and security products. It suits pre-sales engineers, network engineers moving toward design work, and administrators who want to justify architecture decisions rather than just operate gear. The Aruba ACDA study guide has 6 sections and about 1,774 words.
01Design Fundamentals and Methodology
Every credible design begins with a documented requirements-gathering phase: business drivers (growth, compliance, cost), technical requirements (capacity, availability, latency), and constraints (budget, legacy gear, physical plant). A candidate must distinguish functional requirements (what the network must do) from non-functional requirements (how well it must do it - availability targets, throughput, convergence time).
328 words, about 2 min02Campus Wired Network Design
Campus wired design is built on a hierarchy: access (user ports, PoE, VLAN edge), distribution (policy, inter-VLAN routing, aggregation), and core (high-speed transport). Small campuses collapse distribution and core into a collapsed core .
297 words, about 1 min03Campus Wireless Network Design
Wireless design starts with a site survey - predictive (modeling), passive (listen), or active (validate) - and a stated coverage and capacity requirement. Coverage designs target signal strength (commonly around -67 dBm RSSI for voice/data at the cell edge); capacity designs target client density and per-client throughput.
300 words, about 2 min04WAN and Branch Connectivity Design
WAN design balances cost, bandwidth, latency, and availability . Know the options: MPLS (private, SLA-backed, expensive), Internet/VPN (cheap, variable), dedicated fiber/Ethernet , broadband , LTE/5G as primary or backup, and SD-WAN overlays that abstract multiple transports with policy-based path selection.
295 words, about 1 min05Network Security Design
The security domain asks you to place controls at every layer: edge (firewall, IPS/IDS, DDoS protection), campus (802.1X/NAC, segmentation, DHCP snooping, dynamic ARP inspection, port security), wireless (WPA3-Enterprise, RADIUS), and data (encryption in transit and at rest). Know zero trust principles - verify explicitly, least privilege, assume breach - and how micro-segmentation limits lateral movement.
289 words, about 1 min06Network Management and Monitoring Design
Management and monitoring design defines what is observed, how it is collected, and who acts on it. Know the protocols: SNMP (polling and traps; v3 for auth/privacy), syslog (centralized logging with severity levels), NetFlow/sFlow/IPFIX (traffic telemetry), streaming telemetry (push-based, high-frequency), and NTP (accurate timestamps are essential for correlation).
265 words, about 1 min