Aruba Data Center Professional study guide
Aruba Data Center Professional · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Aruba Data Center Professional credential is a vendor certification aimed at network engineers, data center architects, and implementation specialists who design, build, and operate Aruba CX-based data center fabrics. It sits above associate-level switching knowledge and assumes the candidate is comfortable with campus-scale routing and switching before walking into a spine-and-leaf world. The Aruba Data Center Professional study guide has 8 sections and about 2,701 words.
01Data Center Network Architecture and Design
Every candidate should be able to explain why a two-tier CLOS (spine–leaf) fabric replaced three-tier designs in the data center: predictable any-to-any latency of two hops, scale-out by adding leaves or spines, and ECMP everywhere instead of spanning tree. Leaves connect servers (top-of-rack) and never connect to each other; spines connect only to leaves.
333 words, about 2 min02Aruba CX Switching Platforms and AOS-CX Fundamentals
Aruba CX is one operating system (AOS-CX) across many boxes. Match family to role: the 6300 fixed stackable access/leaf, the 6400 compact modular aggregation, the 8320/8325/8360 high-density leaf/ToR, the 8400 modular chassis, and the 9300/10000 spine and data-center core platforms.
340 words, about 2 min03Underlay Routing and Fabric Topologies
The underlay's only job is to give every VTEP loopback reachability over as many equal-cost paths as possible. Point-to-point /31 links, a loopback per switch used as router-ID and VTEP source, and either OSPF or eBGP.
333 words, about 2 min04VXLAN/EVPN Overlay Networking
VXLAN wraps the original Ethernet frame in a UDP/IP packet (destination UDP port 4789) with an 8-byte VXLAN header carrying a 24-bit VNI - up to roughly 16 million segments. The encapsulating device is a VTEP, normally identified by a loopback address.
341 words, about 2 min05Network Virtualization and Multitenancy
Multitenancy starts with VRFs. Each tenant gets its own VRF (and usually its own VNI), so overlapping address space is fine - 10.0.0.0/24 can exist in three tenants because the VRF, not the prefix, is the identity.
348 words, about 2 min06Security, Segmentation, and Policy Enforcement
Aruba's story is dynamic segmentation: authenticate the user or device once (802.1X, MAC authentication, or device profiling via ClearPass), assign a role, and enforce that role everywhere. On AOS-CX the enforcement points are port access roles, downloadable user roles from ClearPass, and role-based ACLs that follow the user rather than the port.
329 words, about 2 min07Automation, Orchestration, and Infrastructure as Code
Every AOS-CX switch exposes the same intent through a CLI, a REST API, and SNMP or streaming telemetry. The REST API is the foundation: authenticate, obtain a session cookie or token, then GET/POST/PUT against versioned URIs.
324 words, about 2 min08Monitoring, Analytics, and Troubleshooting
Troubleshooting questions are usually 'which command or tool' and 'what does it prove'. Organise them: physical (interface counters, optics, CRC errors), Layer 2 (MAC table, ARP, VLAN membership), Layer 3 (route table, FIB, adjacency), overlay (tunnel state, VNI mapping, EVPN routes), policy (ACL hits, role assignment), and control plane (CPU, BGP/OSPF neighbours, BFD).
353 words, about 2 min