Dell 53-1002116-01 Configuring Port Mirroring using the CEE CLI, Port Mirroring protocol overview

	Chapter
Configuring Port Mirroring using the CEE CLI	13

In this chapter

•Port Mirroring protocol overview	119
•Configuring ingress Port Mirroring	120
•Configuring egress Port Mirroring	120
•Configuring bidirectional Port Mirroring	120
•Deleting a Port Mirroring connection from a session	121
•Deleting a Port Mirroring session	121

Port Mirroring protocol overview

Port Mirroring is used on a network switch to send a copy of network packets seen on one switch port to a network monitoring connection on another switch port. If you are interested in listening or snooping on traffic that passes through a particular port, Port Mirroring artificially copies the packets to a port connected to your analyzer. Usually, this traffic is limited to incoming or outgoing packets, but Fabric OS v6.3.1_cee allows bidirectional traffic monitoring on the source port.

Port Mirroring limitations

The limitations of Port Mirroring connections are as follows:

•Mirror port can be any port on the same switch as the source port.

•Mirror port should not be configured to carry normal traffic.

•A port can not be mirrored to multiple locations in the same direction.

•A BP port is not supported as a source or destination mirror port, because this interface is not exposed to the user.

•Only one port per chip can be configured as a destination port for ingress mirroring.

•Only one port per chip can be configured as a destination port for egress mirroring.

•A port cannot be made a destination port for bi-directional mirroring if a different port on that chip is already configured as destination port for any type of mirroring.

•If a port is configured as a destination port of bi-directional mirroring, no other port on that chip can be made destination port for any type of mirroring.

•The destination mirror port can only handle 10G (line rate) worth of mirror traffic. If multiple ports, or both flows on same port, are mirrored to the same destination mirror port, then only 10G worth of mirror traffic is mirrored and the remaining traffic is ignored.

•If multiple ports (or both flows on same port) are mirrored to the same destination port, and two or more ports process burst traffic, the destination mirror port cannot handle all the bursts and some of the burst traffic is not mirrored.

Dell Converged Enhanced Ethernet Administrator’s Guide	119
53-1002116-01