All things related to multicast

[Bill Owens <>]

On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 08:31:16AM -0400, Richard Mavrogeanes wrote:
> I'd like to explore this group's experience with IPV6 multicast, in 
> particular, what do we believe is the current state of the Internet2 
> backbone network and what do we think is the state of enterprise routers 
> and switches to allow it? 

Abilene, DREN, CA*net 4, NYSERNet, Merit all support it here in North 
America. In Europe nearly everybody has it, most of them native. GEANT was an 
early adopter, but for various reasons were slow to include Embedded-RP; 
however, that configuration is nearly complete now. I'm not sure of the 
penetration in the Pacific Rim, although our colleagues in Japan have 
certainly been amongst the leaders at least on their individual networks; I'm 
not sure what their inter-backbone connectivity looks like. At this point we 
don't have native v6 multicast from the US to Japan.

Equipment? Any Cisco that does software routing (7200 and all the smaller 
boxes). Amongst the hardware routers, CRS-1, 12000 (but not with IOS-XR, 
yet), 7600 with Sup720. I can't remember if the 7300 and 3750 have it, but 
I'm sure if they don't it is in the roadmap. Any Juniper M or T series, not 
sure of the other boxes. I have no idea if any of the other router vendors 
have even noticed v6 multicast yet. Of course you can do it with PC routers 
too, if you're just interested in building a lab; look up mrd6. As for 
switches, the 7600/6500 running IOS can do MLDv2 snooping; the 3750 does both 
versions. And some models of Allied Telesyn switches have it too, or so their 
docs say. 

OS and application support has gotten a lot better, though only Linux has 
MLDv2. It's in the early copies of Vista, but still hasn't made it into 
FreeBSD so it isn't in MacOS X. dbeacon, ssmping and iperf are my most-used 
troubleshooting tools. I have a copy of rtpqual that works too, though 
relatively few of the streams that are floating around actually use RTP. The 
closest we have to a channel guide is: http://dbeacon.innerghost.net/contents

I think at this point the standards have pretty well settled down, so 
implementors shouldn't have to worry about any further churn. Hopefully if we 
can get a few loose ends tied up, it will be possible to implement v6 
multicast right along with v6 as people decide to roll it out. Certainly 
nobody is going to view v6 multicast as a driver; my hope is simply not to 
have it be an impediment.

Bill.