How to Prepare for Cisco’s Quality of Service (QoS) 2.5 Course

by Keith Edwards

The Cisco Systems QoS v2.5 (Implementing Cisco Quality of Service) course is a five-day advanced course dealing with Quality of Service tools, strategies and implementations. This course is technical, detailed, and intense, both in terms of learning new tools based upon algorithmic formulas and how they affect traffic, but also in terms of learning an entire system of commands having to do with implementing those tools.

Please be advised that this course is not intended for a novice network technician. Sending such an individual to this class would be unproductive for the individual and possibly disruptive to the entire class and instructor.

The QoS v2.5 course will explore the reasons for implementing Quality of Service tools and delve into various distinct fields within packets at OSI (Open Systems Interconnect) model layers two, three and four and even relate to information in packet fields as high as layer seven.

We will discuss the order of process for processing packets through switches and routers so that the order of process for discussing packet propagation throughout a network can be understood, at what points to implement individual Quality of Service tools and also the order of process for implementing Quality of Service tools throughout an individual router or switch.

Once the course has discussed the reasons for implementing Quality of Service and where, it goes on to discuss the individual Quality of Service tools individually and gives the student the opportunity to implement them and see the results individually.

What About the Course Labs?

The labs used along with the Skyline ATS QoS course were developed by expert course directors and are like no other QoS labs in existence. Although all of the tasks and labs are based upon implementing and demonstrating everything discussed in this Cisco Systems course, the Skyline labs offer greater visibility and detail into how these various QoS tools affect traffic and traffic propagation. These labs offer excellent visibility into the reduction of jitter, delay, errors and packet loss far better than other labs which only demonstrate the performance of a “ping.”

The student laboratory pod gives students the opportunity to implement the QoS tools taught on a module-by-module basis with their own two hands on actual routers and switches (not simulators). The results of the various tools can then be seen by a network diagnostic system which creates test traffic of multiple varieties so as to simulate actual traffic patterns within an organization and then graph traffic propagation results.

Some lessons in this course go beyond the actual Cisco Systems teachings in an effort to offer superior insight into how to use some QoS tools and implement Quality of Service tools as techniques which can enhance an overall Enterprise implementation of QoS. The lab materials go so far as to teach the student how to customize automated tools to suit the specific traffic recognition and classification of an individual enterprise.

This course material and the Skyline custom labs give a much greater and in-depth understanding of QoS implementation than would be easily understood without this laboratory environment.

Training Resources:
QoS v2.5 (Implementing Cisco Quality of Service)
Cisco Course Catalog

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