On the Inside - Cisco 2811 Router

in today's video we're gonna take apart the Cisco 2800 series is our generation 1 router and look at all the internal components this is gonna be exciting guys let's dive in so this is a Cisco 2800 is are a 2011 to be exact now this is a slightly older router belief cisco stopped supporting them in 2016 but this was a workhorse of the enterprise this router has seen so many different installations it's incredible a workhorse for cisco that's for sure so we're gonna dive into this router look at all the internal components but to get started I want to describe what's on the outside here so we're actually looking at the front of the router here now all routers do look a little bit different but generally they're gonna have similar components so this will give you a really good idea of what to expect when you see any router out in the field now this is a business or enterprise grade router so looking here on the front we see we just have the front bezel right now we have some important ports here on the front we have our console port where we plug in to actually configure the router then we have some other inputs we have an auxilary port which is kind of like our back door if we ever lose access to the console we also have a couple USB ports so we can plug in any kind of USB stick to just use that as an additional memory source and let's see what else we have here on the front ah our compact flash so our flash card that we can store things on on the router internally and we can actually just pop this thing out and use it in a new router if we ever needed to replace the router so it's nice to have a removable compact flash and all modern routers actually have that so also moving over here to the left side we have our power supply now this power supply is a power over ethernet power supply maybe you're thinking why do you have a power over ethernet power supply in a router well the answer is because this router comes complete a Ethernet switch so the power over ethernet power supply we have in here has additional power so that we can actually power this Ethernet switch and also power any phones or wireless access points that are plugged into this way so this is an entire Ethernet switch plugged in to this router why in the heck would we have a switch as part of a router well this router is actually a branch router so let's say you have a bank for example and you have a branch office one of the bank's branches well at that branch you're going to need a device to handle all the network connections and in this case we have a branch router that can handle it routing but we also want to just slide a switch in here because we can easily then just support hosts like a normal switch would all within the same device so basically it saves a space saves us equipment but we could do the same job with a complete separate switch anyhow I'll just explain to you guys that we do have a complete module here it's an entire switch and I'll show you later I'll pull it out so you can see that the actual switch does come out of the router if we want it to we also have our line cards here in the back our line card slots so we can just go ahead and unscrew on these guys and I'll show you the purpose of these line cards is so that we can change the type of interface we have connecting out to the win or any type of connection that we have in our network in this case here we have a t1 line card so wherever this router was used and this router was used in the field wherever this router was used it must have been connecting over a t1 circuit because this is a t1 DSU CSU old school t1 car now if we were connecting to something else maybe let's say a fast ethernet we could pop a fast ethernet card in here we could also pop a voice card in here we can use these expansion slots to configure and add any type of connectivity we want to this router so that's what's so great about enterprise-grade routers and you can see here we just slide it right back in pops in now this switch will do the same exact thing so let me go ahead and pull the switch out and you can see how this guy looks whenever we take it out of the router chassis all right so let's go ahead and pull out this switch check it out nice and easy light so now you can see that literally it is an entire switch on its own and this is the interface where it actually connects to the router main board so I'll leave that guy out just leave it right there and we also have a couple onboard interfaces that come no matter what on this router - if you were to buy this router completely bare bones and would have at least these two Ethernet interfaces here one two now in the case of this router these are Fast Ethernet or 100 megabit per second Ethernet interfaces on more modern routers like the ISR g2 or even the 4000 series cisco routers these are going to be gigabit ports onboard so that's one disadvantage if people still do have these twenty hundreds in their network although these routers may still work pretty well so that's our own board interfaces that's our line card as well I showed you that and we have our Ethernet switch which we pulled out and just remind you again on the front panel we had our console port there in our compact flash now the reason why I'm showing you that again is because we're about to take the top off and I'll show you where those actually connect so on this particular router there's just a few screws before the exact that will need to unscrew here [Music] and to take the top of this router chassis off you just unscrew the screws and you just pull it out and it will unlock for you and this is the inside of the router so just like a PC if you've ever opened up any type of computer it has a main board and it has other areas where you can plug other stuff into it other stuff such as this complete Ethernet switch alright so I was mentioning a little bit earlier about this front panel now if we look at the front panel we can see where it connects on the inside on the inside there's another board right here so I'm actually just going to remove this ribbon cable now this ribbon cable here is what passes all of the data from any of these slots or any of these ports including the flash board here and passes it over to the main board so I've just disconnected all those from the main board now I'm removing the airflow component there's also a fan right here well you can see on the inside of this router where that compact flash card is plugged in it was literally just I can get it out Nerys it's literally just a little slot right here and it's a little circuit board it had us all on its own to control these components and then that ribbon cable I showed you connects that circuit board into the main board so that's how that works now we can go ahead and dive into some more of these components actually on the board now I have a lot of the classic stuff here for example it's a router so it's going to have a CPU a ROM chip and also NVRAM now these three items the CPU which is the processor the read-only memory the ROM which is where our ROM monitor and and and boot files are stored that's on the board and then we also have NVRAM our non-volatile gram that's part of the motherboard as well now it's one of these three three box here but I'm not sure exactly which one those are so it's not really shown in the documentation because you can't remove them so those three items they're built into the board but then we also do have our a random access memory and our PV DMS and also our advanced integration module and I'll show you all those components or we'll remove all those components rather so starting here with the random access memory card this is just like you would see in a computer a personal computer so we can just pull these tabs here and pop out the RAM chip this is an older router so it's got 256 megabytes of RAM on that card modern ones you'll see at least one gigabyte now this next chip here that looks just like a RAM chip is actually something called a PV DM and the purpose of a PD it PV DM is to host the DSPs or the digital signal processors this is necessary for things like transcoding voice calls and also just handling voice calls if you have a traditional PRI or a t1 circuit with a voice PRI you're going to need a PV DM to be able to handle those calls so depending on the amount of memory you have on your PDM determines how many calls can actually pass through the router now if you're working with newer voice over IP technology like sip for example you don't need the PV DM just to process calls what you do still need it for things like transcoding anyhow my point here is this is an extra card just for your voice traffic and it's like a Ram chip for voice your PB DM that's on the router as well so those are our memory components that we have the RAM and the PV DM PVD M again is just for voice now we also have other memory components that are built into the board like we said before and that's the read-only memory and also the in Braham non-volatile ramp now there is another memory component that we already discussed and can you guys remember what it is it is that flash memory card now of course we do have a lesson in our program where we describe all these things in a lot of detail in the types of things each form of memory does but this video is specifically for just looking at the inside of a router pretty awesome alright so the next thing we'd like to look at here or I'd like to look at and show you guys is the a.i.m module so this is the advanced integration module on these series of routers we had an additional module we needed in order to do things like encryption so if we wanted to have VPN traffic passing through this router we would have to or create VPNs on this router we would have to have this additional advanced integration module and this module has its own memory and its own CPU and everything I'm going to take this guy out and we can look at it as well just a couple screws [Music] now for you super nerds and Geeks out there you may be thinking why doesn't he have on an ESD strap well I'm really not concerned about this router is very old but for newer stuff you would want to have an ESD strap if you wanted to make sure you can have any static electricity pass from your body and burn out a cert before it can con it so just making sure you guys understand that all right this a IM module is about to slide on out of here and there it is so again this thing has its own memory its own cpu and everything like that and this whole purpose is to be able to process encrypted traffic and to create VPNs and stuff for us on this router a complete module for that now there are different types of modules and feature cards that we can put in our routers so that's one great thing about Cisco Systems on the forefront of routing for so many years is they really led the pack in the versatility of routers and you can see we can really customize these things just like you can customize a home computer or a PC so now we're looking at our router and you see it's getting kind of bare here I'm gonna go ahead and make it a little more bare and pull everything out so we can see what the router looks like with just the mainboard primarily as a component this was that t1 card also you can see here our line card module where all of our line cards plug in and pass their data traffic into the mainboard so the last really component we have here we have our fans I'm not going to pull those out but I am going to pull out the power supply now get a beefy heavy power supply this this power supply that provides enough power to even power phones and access points via this cable here you see this cable reaches back to where the switch was plugged in and that's where it provides the power into the switch some go ahead and pull this one out older router here just connect all the power connectors and that one screw here that holds it in place and that is the power supply for this old 20 on a series router pretty cool now these twenty hundred series routers actually came originally out of the box without apoE power supply it could not support the phones on the switches but you can see here it had this says IP on the front and it's got a picture of a phone there meaning that this power supply can power up phones plugging into this router or into the switch that we have plugged into the router so all right now we have the router pretty much down just to its mainboard and you can see this is just like if you were to take apart a computer like a PC or something and unplug all the components the video card take out all the RAM and just being left with the motherboard that's pretty much what we just did for this router now it's super lightweight I could throw this thing like a frisbee not really but that is what a router basically is comprised of we went through all the components so now guys I'm going to go ahead and put it back together [Music] [Music] there we have our fully put back together recompose 2800 series router wasn't that awesome guys I know I really enjoyed it I hope you learned a lot about what's the on the inside of a is our Cisco router cool little cool little router like I said before it's done a lot of work for us these are great routers and if you haven't got a router for your lab yet this is actually a good one and you can take it apart look at the inside yourself and you can find these guys on eBay for relatively cheap these days now if you enjoyed this video please like and subscribe and as always my name is Jacob Hess I hope you guys have a great one and I'll see you in the next video Jayco pass here thank you guys for viewing the video I hope you really enjoyed it and I'd also like to remind you that if you're truly serious about your career in information technology be sure to check out our career blueprint and engineer training program and ww0 to engineer calm you

Channel: NexGenT

Views: 44,576

Rating: 4.9597588 out of 5

Keywords: Network, Engineer, Cisco, Network+, CCNA, CCNP, CCIE, Router, Network Engineer, Systems Engineer, Routing and Switching

Id: 3FRwd8RhCVM

Length: 15min 55sec (955 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 01 2018