7 Essential/New features make deploying Wired 802.1x easier on a Cisco infrastructure

Cisco released a score of new 802.1x features in 12.2.33 SXI for their Catalyst 6500 switch lineup. These new features focus on making dot1x easier to deploy. Hmmm…Is that an oxymoron: dot1x and easy? Well perhaps not anymore. You can now deploy full dot1x features in a quasi “monitor only” mode. This allows you to see what is going to happen in your live environment before you enable true enforcement.

Architecting, implementing, and supporting a wired 802.1x protected network can be one of the most challenging endeavors of your networking career. This is especially true if you find yourself just blindly bumbling through the project and not actively planning and designing for it. I’ve seen my fair share of wired dot1x implementations fail over the years; the reasons vary from customer to customer. But an overarching truth remained constant across them all; “This dot1x stuff is non-trivial!”

In my patch, new 802.1x projects dwindled to almost nothing for a couple years. But recently I’ve seen a strong resurgence by large companies wanting to give it a go or give it another go depending. I’m not going to pretend to know why but if I had to guess I would say it is because 802.1x is riding the recent popularity wave of all things NAC.

So today I wanted to write on the top 7 802.1x switch features you’ll most likely need to pull off a successful deployment. Here they are:

• Cisco
• LANs / WANs
• Security
• 6500 802.1x
• 802.1x
• 802.1x tips
• Cisco Security
• dot1x
• Heary
• Jamey Heary