Cisco Storm-Control Configuration

Hello Sean

Concerning your first question, you’re essentially asking what algorithm is used to allow storm control to function. Well, when the rising threshold is reached, all subsequent broadcast frames are dropped completely. However, the interface is still measuring the arrival of broadcast frames and is taking into account the number of bytes that are being received even though they are being dropped.

They will continue to be dropped until the arriving frame rate falls below the falling threshold.

So to answer your question directly, it blocks all the broadcast traffic completely until the falling threshold is reached.

More details on how this algorithm works can be found in the following Cisco documentation:

For your second question, if you have storm control configured for multicast and a multicast storm occurs, it could potentially disrupt network protocols that rely on multicast traffic, like OSPF or EIGRP. These protocols could indeed lose neighbor relationships if the multicast traffic is blocked because they rely on multicast messages to establish and maintain neighbor relationships.

For this reason, storm control for multicast should be used carefully. You must weigh the potential benefits and drawbacks of the use of storm control in such situations.

I hope this has been helpful!

Laz

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