Cisco Certified Design Expert (CCDE) Practice Exam 2025: Latest Questions

An enterprise is redesigning its WAN to support multiple transport types (MPLS and Internet) while reducing operational risk during failures. Which design principle best supports predictable failure behavior and simpler troubleshooting?

A campus is moving from a traditional Layer 2 access with large VLANs to a more scalable design. Which approach is generally recommended to reduce spanning-tree impact while maintaining simple access-layer operations?

A service provider edge design uses OSPF in the IGP and MP-BGP for VPNv4. During a core link flap, remote sites experience prolonged blackholing for some prefixes. Which design change most directly improves convergence and reduces blackholing for affected prefixes?

A network team needs to ensure users can still resolve internal application names if the primary data center DNS cluster becomes unreachable. Which DNS design is the best practice for resilience without relying on a single site?

A global enterprise is designing Internet edge security. The requirement is to minimize lateral movement if a user VLAN is compromised, while still allowing necessary access to shared services (DNS, NTP, authentication). Which high-level design best meets the requirement?

A company uses EIGRP in the campus and BGP toward multiple WAN providers. The design goal is to keep the campus stable and avoid external route churn impacting internal convergence. Which approach is most appropriate?

A data center uses MLAG/vPC at the access layer. After introducing a new pair of aggregation switches, intermittent traffic loss occurs only for a subset of VLANs during maintenance events. Which design issue is the most likely root cause?

A network is adopting automation for provisioning branch routers. The primary objective is consistent deployments with auditability and the ability to roll back changes. Which approach best aligns with those goals?

A financial institution must design a multi-tenant data center with strict separation between tenants while still allowing shared security services (e.g., centralized inspection) without leaking routing information between tenants. Which design best meets the requirement?

An enterprise runs dual-homed branches to two WAN hubs. The routing design uses OSPF in the WAN. During a hub failure, some branches form adjacencies to the remaining hub but still prefer paths through the failed hub, causing suboptimal routing and occasional loops. Which design change most effectively prevents this behavior?

An enterprise is standardizing on a two-tier (leaf-spine) campus design. The current goal is to reduce convergence impact from access-layer events and keep the failure domain small. Which design choice best supports this objective?

A design team is documenting how to prioritize decision-making in a large multi-domain redesign. Which activity is most aligned with CCDE-level best practice for establishing design direction early?

A company is designing DNS for multiple internal applications with strict uptime requirements. Which approach best improves resilience without introducing complex application changes?

A global enterprise uses a dual-provider WAN. Traffic must prefer Provider A, but must fail over quickly to Provider B if A has partial degradation (high loss) even when BGP sessions remain up. Which design is most appropriate?

A financial institution must segment workloads into multiple security zones in a shared data center fabric. The security team requires zone-to-zone policy enforcement and strong isolation, while the network team wants to minimize ACL sprawl on every leaf switch. Which design choice best fits these goals?

A campus network currently stretches multiple VLANs across several buildings for user mobility, causing frequent broadcast-related incidents. The business still requires mobility but can tolerate a brief IP change during building moves. Which redesign best addresses the root issue?

An enterprise is migrating to an SD-WAN solution and wants automated, repeatable branch turn-up with minimal manual CLI. The design must also support compliance by proving that deployed configurations match an approved intent. Which capability is most important to include?

A company needs to expose internal APIs to partners. The security requirement is to authenticate partners, apply rate limiting, and inspect traffic before it reaches application servers. Which design component best meets these needs?

A service provider is designing an MPLS L3VPN core. They require strict separation between customer routes and the ability to scale to thousands of VRFs without maintaining full mesh iBGP sessions between all PEs. Which approach best satisfies these requirements?

A multi-tenant data center provides shared services (DNS, NTP, patching) used by all tenants. Tenants must not be able to reach each other directly, but all must reach shared services. The team wants to minimize policy complexity and avoid accidental route leaks. Which design is best?

An enterprise is redesigning its WAN to support two active upstream ISPs at each hub. The business requirement is to keep inbound traffic for public services evenly utilized across both ISPs, while still allowing rapid failover if one ISP link fails. Which design best meets this requirement with the least operational complexity?

A campus design uses a pair of distribution switches per building. During a brownout event, one distribution switch in a building reboots. Users report 30–45 seconds of intermittent connectivity loss for several VLANs even though redundant uplinks exist. Which design change most directly reduces the impact of an access-to-distribution topology change during such failures?

A retail chain uses SD-WAN for thousands of branches. The current process requires engineers to manually edit per-site device configurations for QoS, ACLs, and routing policies. The company wants consistent policy enforcement, rapid onboarding, and the ability to audit changes. Which approach best aligns with automation best practices for this requirement?

A financial services network must allow third-party vendors to access only a specific set of internal APIs. The security team requires strong identity-based controls, least privilege, and the ability to revoke access quickly without changing IP addressing. Which design choice best meets these requirements?

An enterprise is deploying DNS-based global load balancing (GSLB) for two active data centers. During testing, users occasionally get directed to a data center that is reachable but currently failing the application health check (app is down, network is up). Which design improvement most directly addresses this issue?