Routing: EIGRP Named Mode

 Today we are going to talk about the EIGRP enhanced version where many of the capabilities are putting together to make a new version of EIGRP and it is called as EIGRP named mode. 

Earlier you configuring EIGRP in the classic way but the capabilities like support for IPv6, Support for the VRF concepts added to the new version of EIGRP as EIGRP named mode.

You can simply upgrade your network with the EIGRP named mode from the basic or you so called classic mode of EIGRP. 

It was said by the developers and Cisco that you can upgrade the named mode of EIGRP from classic EIGRP without network flaps or EIGRP process re-start. That is the amazing way of doing the upgrade in your network if you are running the classic EIGRP.

Fig 1.1- EIGRP Named Mode

For upgradation of the EIGRP named from Classic EIGRP version you need to use the below mentioned command in your CLI interface of the router

The upper used command eigrp upgrade-cli command blocks the router from accepting any other command until the conversion is complete (the console is locked). The time taken to complete the conversion depends on the size of the configuration. However, the conversion is a one-time activity. 

It was also said that the eigrp upgrade-cli command is available only under EIGRP classic router configuration mode. Therefore, you can convert configurations from classic mode to named mode but not vice-versa. 

Lets take a look in the configuration part where we have the reference configuration of the traditional and the Named EIGRP configuration one by one. The IP addresses uses in the below configuration is for the demo purposes and has no relevance with any of the enterprise networks

EIGRP Traditional Configuration

Now let's look on the EIGRP named mode configuration with respect to the Classic way of configuring the EIGRP in the network as shown in the above mentioned configuration part

EIGRP Named Configuration