All things related to multicast

[Bill Owens <>]

On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 02:56:10PM -0400, Richard Mavrogeanes wrote:
> Flooding in a campus is bad.  Very bad. While one could say "it shouldn't", 
> it does affect PC's, printers, and VLANs that have been carved out for 
> special treatment.   I know of no enterprise/campus network with GigE to 
> every desktop or printer, so I think its a huge issue that will all but 
> prevent IPV6 multicast from going anywhere untill affordable 8, 16, 32 port 
> switches won't flood.  
>  
> Do such things exist?

Not for v6 multicast. Do they exist for v4? I've never seen them, but if you 
have part numbers to share I'd like to pick some up.

One might imagine that any switch smart enough to do v4 snooping would also 
support VLANs, and so for at least the initial implementation of v6 multicast 
it would suffice to put those hosts in their own VLAN'ed world. Especially if 
one is using hardware codecs. Makes mobility harder, and it wouldn't work for 
a cable replacement setup, but it would at least allow some deployment.

BTW, we have not yet had any issues with v6 multicast flooding, unless we 
push a stream faster than the Fast Ethernet ports can handle.

Bill.