The Campus Wired LAN Foundation in Two Point Campus

The campus wired LAN foundation carries critical business applications and provides wireless network access for students and guests. A high-performance, reliable network is required for these important functions.

Traditional LAN designs add resiliency through redundant links and switches at the access and aggregation layers. This resiliency increases configuration complexity.

An alternative to these resiliency options is an open standards-based overlay solution, such as BGP EVPN VXLAN. It offers automation and assurance support for macro and micro segmentation policies integrated with wireless.

Security

The campus environment provides network access for internal employees, third-party partners and customers over multiple physical buildings. Unlike branches, campuses have larger attack surfaces and a complex mix of services and devices. They can be difficult to manage and require more security capabilities to defend.

These threats are primarily addressable by the campus security architecture and solutions. The architecture splits the security layer into the access/distribution/core and services layers. This hierarchical design simplifies network troubleshooting and segments traffic for security inspection.

Employees, third parties and customers use a wide range of devices to browse the web, collaborate and email. They can become infected by malware that can encrypt sensitive files, spread infection to other machines, or slow down network performance. Attackers may also employ social engineering tactics like phishing to compromise employees. The campus security architecture and solutions are designed to detect these attacks and respond accordingly. They can include on-device protections, posture checking and stateful filtering.

Networking

Colleges and universities need advanced networks to support their mission-critical functions. In the COVID-19 era, they must protect student data and provide resiliency to their campuses and buildings.

Network administrators can use SDN to create high priority paths for big data flows. This alleviates a performance crunch created by appliances like traffic shaping, load balancing and firewalls that slow north-south bandwidth to 100Mbps. Instead, scientific flows are routed around these performance-sapping middleboxes, allowing for 88 times faster transfer of research results to offsite locations on Internet2.

A simplified distribution layer reduces configuration complexity and provides resiliency in the face of operational and configuration errors. For example, a physical stack of switches that operate as one device (StackWise Virtual) replaces the redundancy provided by multiple redundant layers of switches in traditional multilayer campus designs. A distributed BGP EVPN control plane also scales better than traditional options and provides stateful switchover for redundant logical control planes. This allows the network to recover from failures within seconds without disruption to users.

Mobility

As Students progress through the Virtual Normality course, they will need more facilities to study in. As well as Rooms and Teachers, they will occasionally need access to special equipment pieces in order to complete Assignments. The game will inform you when this happens, and it is advisable to plan for all potential assignments ahead of time, to avoid missing out on the extra Kudosh that can be earned by completing achievement missions.

The most important facility for this course is the VR Lab, where Classes are held, and the Lecture Theatre where students will have lectures. It is also necessary to hire Teachers who have the Virtual Normality qualification, with up to a maximum of Qualification Level 3 – though you can upgrade their qualifications as you see fit. It is possible to reduce student numbers for this course, but it’s not recommended: Virtual Normality is one of the hardest courses in Two Point Campus to get good grades on, and dropping students will quickly impact your reputation.

Collaboration

After Scientography, Virtual Normality is the second Course you unlock in Two Point Campus. It is one of the most forgiving courses in the game, requiring only basic facilities and not being particularly taxing for students. It does require a Lecture Theatre and VR Lab to run Classes, however, which should always be kept fully staffed. Teachers teaching the course will be required to have a Virtual Normality Qualification, and there will be a maximum number of Classes they can teach each month. This can be raised by upgrading the Course level, but only a small amount; it is highly recommended that you do not lower the student numbers to do so. Library rooms will also be required, and these will require various pieces of equipment to function.

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