This walk-in lab session provides participants with hands-on experience in advanced networking and security concepts using smart switches, DPUs, and Hypershield. Attendees will deepen their understanding of segmentation firewalls on N9K switches and learn how to integrate smart switches with both on-premises Hypershield and cloud-based Security Cloud Control (SCC) to design and deploy firewall policies.

The session demonstrates the convergence of networking and security in a single switch hardware (collapsed architecture) and offers practical implementation of zone-based segmentation between different subnets within the same VRFs. Participants will observe the end-to-end process of policy deployment from SCC, including the syntax and semantics of these policies.

The lab covers the configuration of IPv4 and IPv6 firewalling with VRF redirection to DPUs and illustrates how DPUs enable L4 stateful firewall services, positioning smart switches as potential replacements for existing L4 stateful firewalls (excluding perimeter firewalls).

Management of smart switches is showcased using Nexus Dashboard 4.2, highlighting both networking and firewall use cases with future Hypershield integration.

Please note, the products featured in this lab are under active development, and some features may be subject to change.