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Hard Difficulty Questions

Practise Cisco SPCOR / CCNP Service Provider Core 350-501 practice questions — original exam-style scenarios covering every exam domain, with detailed explanations, wrong-answer analysis, and common exam traps.

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Scenario guide

How to approach hard difficulty questions

These are the questions most candidates get wrong. They require connecting multiple concepts, reading tricky output, or knowing edge-case behaviour that isn't on most study cards. Practising them trains you to operate under uncertainty — a necessary skill on the real exam.

Quick answer

Hard Difficulty Questions questions test whether you can apply the concept in context, not just recognise a definition.

How the topic appears in realistic exam-style scenarios.

Which detail in the question changes the correct answer.

How to eliminate plausible but wrong options.

How to connect the question back to the wider exam objective.

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Practice set

Practice scenarios

Question 1hardmulti select
Read the full MPLS explanation →

Which THREE components are required to deploy MPLS Layer 3 VPN?

Question 2hardmultiple choice
Review the full OSPF breakdown →

A network engineer is troubleshooting OSPFv3 on a service provider's IPv6 network. The router shows that OSPFv3 adjacency never reaches FULL, says 'Init'. The neighbor is directly connected over a point-to-point link. What is the most likely cause?

Question 3hardmultiple choice
Read the full MPLS explanation →

Refer to the exhibit. An engineer is troubleshooting an MPLS LDP session between two routers. The output shows that the LDP session is operational. However, MPLS labels are not being exchanged. What is the most likely cause?

Exhibit

Router# show mpls ldp neighbor
    Peer LDP Ident: 10.1.1.2:0; Local LDP Ident: 10.1.1.1:0
        TCP connection: 10.1.1.2.646 - 10.1.1.1.52300
        State: Oper; Msgs sent/rcvd: 100/101; Downstream on demand
        Up time: 01:23:45
        LDP discovery sources:
            GigabitEthernet0/0/0; xc: 10.1.1.2:0
        Addresses bound to peer LDP Ident:
            10.2.2.2        10.3.3.3
Question 4hardmulti select
Read the full MPLS explanation →

Which THREE of the following are benefits of using Segment Routing over LDP in an MPLS network? (Choose three.)

Question 5hardmultiple choice
Read the full VPN explanation →

In EVPN multihoming with all-active mode, what is the purpose of the aliasing capability?

Question 6hardmultiple choice
Open the full BGP breakdown →

Refer to the exhibit. A service provider is receiving BGP prefixes from a customer (AS 64512). The provider wants to tag all routes from that customer that match prefix 10.1.0.0/16 or more specific with community 65000:100, while not modifying other routes. After applying the configuration, which statement is true?

Exhibit

router bgp 65000
 neighbor 192.168.1.1 remote-as 64512
 address-family ipv4 unicast
  neighbor 192.168.1.1 route-map SET_COMMUNITY in
 !
route-map SET_COMMUNITY permit 10
 match ip address prefix-list MATCH_CUST_A
 set community 65000:100 additive
!
route-map SET_COMMUNITY deny 20
!
ip prefix-list MATCH_CUST_A seq 5 permit 10.1.0.0/16 le 24
Question 7hardmultiple choice
Open the full BGP breakdown →

A service provider is designing a multicast solution for a Layer 3 VPN. They want to use MVPN with BGP signaling (draft-rosen). The PE routers are configured with VRF and multicast routing enabled. Which BGP address family must be enabled between PE routers to carry multicast routing information?

Question 8hardmulti select
Open the full BGP breakdown →

Which THREE characteristics apply to the BGP-LS (BGP Link State) protocol?

Question 9hardmultiple choice
Study the full QoS explanation →

Refer to the exhibit. A service provider is applying this QoS policy on a PE-CE interface. The business customer complains that voice traffic (marked with DSCP EF) experiences drops during congestion. What is the likely cause?

Exhibit

interface GigabitEthernet0/0/0/0
 ipv4 address 10.1.1.1 255.255.255.252
 service-policy output QOS_POLICY
!
class-map match-any REALTIME
 match precedence 5
 match dscp ef
!
policy-map QOS_POLICY
 class REALTIME
  priority level 1
  police rate percent 10
 class class-default
  bandwidth remaining ratio 1
Question 10hardmultiple choice
Open the full BGP breakdown →

A network engineer is automating BGP configuration using the Cisco IOS-XE YANG model. They want to enable the 'always-compare-med' feature under BGP. Which XPath expression correctly targets this leaf?

Question 11hardmultiple choice
Open the full BGP breakdown →

A service provider is troubleshooting BGP route advertisement for a VPNv4 prefix. The PE router receives the prefix from the route reflector but does not install it in the VRF routing table. The BGP table shows the prefix as valid but not best. What is the most likely cause?

Question 12hardmultiple choice
Read the full MPLS explanation →

A service provider uses an MPLS-TE tunnel to carry voice and data traffic. The tunnel is experiencing packet loss during congestion. The engineer wants to ensure that voice traffic receives guaranteed bandwidth and low latency while data traffic uses remaining bandwidth. Which QoS configuration should be applied on the tunnel interface?

Question 13hardmultiple choice
Open the full BGP breakdown →

Refer to the exhibit. An engineer is configuring Segment Routing for BGP (BGP-SR) on a PE router to assign labels to prefixes learned from a CE. The route-policy SET-LABEL is applied to the neighbor under the address-family ipv4 unicast. However, the CE prefix 10.1.1.0/24 is not receiving the label. What is the most likely reason?

Exhibit

Refer to the exhibit.

router bgp 65000
 neighbor 10.0.0.1 remote-as 65001
 neighbor 10.0.0.1 update-source Loopback0
 !
 address-family vpnv4
  neighbor 10.0.0.1 activate
  neighbor 10.0.0.1 send-community extended
 exit-address-family
!
route-policy SET-LABEL
  if destination in (10.1.1.0/24) then
    set label-index 100
  endif
 end-policy
Question 14hardmultiple choice
Read the full MPLS explanation →

A network engineer is designing a Layer 2 VPN using EVPN with MPLS data plane. The customer requires all-hub multipoint connectivity with optimal multicast replication. Which EVPN route type is used to advertise multicast group membership?

Question 15hardmultiple choice
Study the full multicast explanation →

A network engineer needs to design a multicast solution for IPTV distribution across a service provider network. Which protocol is best suited for building a shared distribution tree where the RP is dynamically elected?

Question 16hardmultiple choice
Read the full MPLS explanation →

A service provider is designing a QoS policy for a multi-service MPLS VPN network that carries voice, video, and data traffic. The network uses DiffServ and MPLS EXP markings. The design must ensure that voice traffic is given priority over video and data, while video traffic should have better treatment than data but not at the expense of voice. The provider plans to use a hierarchical QoS (HQoS) policy at the PE-CE interfaces. Which configuration approach best meets these requirements?

Question 17hardmultiple choice
Open the full BGP breakdown →

An SP uses BGP FlowSpec to mitigate DDoS attacks. They also want to rate-limit the traffic per FlowSpec rule. Which configuration is required to enable policing within a FlowSpec action?

Question 18hardmultiple choice
Study the full QoS explanation →

Refer to the exhibit. A network automation engineer uses NETCONF to retrieve the QoS policy 'POLICE-CUSTOMER'. Based on the response, what is the effect of this policy?

Exhibit

Refer to the exhibit.

<rpc xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:netconf:base:1.0">
 <get>
  <filter type="subtree">
   <policy-maps xmlns="http://cisco.com/ns/yang/Cisco-IOS-XR-qos-ma-cfg">
    <policy-map>
     <type>qos</type>
     <name>POLICE-CUSTOMER</name>
    </policy-map>
   </policy-maps>
  </filter>
 </get>
</rpc>

Response:
<data xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:netconf:base:1.0">
 <policy-maps xmlns="http://cisco.com/ns/yang/Cisco-IOS-XR-qos-ma-cfg">
  <policy-map>
   <type>qos</type>
   <name>POLICE-CUSTOMER</name>
   <class>
    <name>class-default</name>
    <police>
     <cir>256000</cir>
     <conform-action>transmit</conform-action>
     <exceed-action>drop</exceed-action>
    </police>
   </class>
  </policy-map>
 </policy-maps>
</data>
Question 19hardmultiple choice
Study the full QoS explanation →

An SP router is configured with a hierarchical QoS policy (parent policy shaper, child policy with CBWFQ). When applying this policy to an interface, the router reports 'Policy map not found' error. What is the most likely cause?

Question 20hardmultiple choice
Study the full QoS explanation →

An enterprise uses IPsec VPN to connect branch offices. They apply QoS policies on the tunnel interface but notice that original DSCP markings are not preserved after encryption. Which feature should be enabled to maintain end-to-end QoS?

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