Hi, I have multiple eg.4 100G L3 links between two routers how exactly will it load balance for example 160 Gb/s multicast traffic?
Hello Oliver
Load balancing in general across L3 links in such a scenario as the one you describe is typically achieved using equal cost multipath routing (ECMP) typically configured using routing protocols such as OSPF, EIGRP, or BGP in conjunction with CEF.
For multicast traffic, PIM is the most commonly used multicast routing protocol. However, PIM does not have its own load-balancing mechanism. Instead, it relies on the underlying unicast routing protocols and the router’s load-balancing strategy. So for your particular scenario, if you ensure that you have ECMP configured correctly for your underlying routing configuration, you should also see the appropriate load balancing for your multicast traffic as well.
Ultimately, whatever you end up doing, you should examine the results using a network monitoring system that will either verify that load balancing is successful, or will indicate that there is room for optimization. Let us know how you get along in your configuration.
I hope this has been helpful!
Laz
Hi Laz, copy super helpful I’m using OSPF and PIM. It looks like Nvidia has all the following ECMP types enabled by default in ONYX:
source-ip-port – source ip and TCP/UDP port
destination-ip-port – destination ip and TCP/UDP port
source-destination-ip-port – source & destination ip and TCP/UDP port
flow-label – flow label
udk – user-defined keys
all – all options
consistent – consistent hashing mode
I’ll dive deeper in those types because I’m not familiar with them (yet). I’m mainly streaming 2110 video with speeds of up to 15Gb/s per stream. It would be nice to dictate which stream takes which link but that is Open Flow territory I guess.
Kind regards Oliver
Hello Oliver
Indeed, each vendor will have different methods of implementing ECMP. Cisco focuses on CEF. Here are a few more resources that may help:
- Multicast load splitting across equal cost paths
- CEF Load Balancing Algorithm
- BGP Load Balancing
- Equal Cost Multipath Routing
- HSRP-Aware PIM
I hope this has been helpful!
Laz