Multicast isolated by VLANs.

Question

Hi.

I divided my switch in two vlans so that I could multi/broadcast in each vlan without interfering on other nodes. It seems that my PowerConnect 5324 struggles to manage this very simple scenario when the multicast workload is high. That is, after some broadcasts I started getting "no route to host" on my machines.

So, two doubts:
- do you confirm 5324 would have problems to handle two multicast groups with the ip on different vlans?

- if I don't split, just use different multicast ips would one interfere in the performance of the other? I could try this, but we have a long lived (3 weeks so far) application that cannot be stopped for the sake of the tests.

In the hope you will answer.

GregG1 · Answer

It sounds like the switch is flooding the multicast traffic as would be expected if you have no IGMP Querier on the VLAN. IGMP Snooping does not provide any function if you have no IGMP Querier. Also, if the multicast source is on a different VLAN than the destination, you would need a multicast routing protocol like PIM or DVMRP to route to another VLAN. Without these components necessary for dynamic multicast support, you would need to statically configure the multicast groups.   Currently, the only PowerConnect switch available with the IGMP Query feature is the 6024.

camjon · Answer

Thanks for the answer.

So, is there any way of having two completely independent nets in the same 5324 (no other hardware available), without performance degradation when heavily making use of multicast?

Thank you.

GregG1 · Answer

Broadcast and Multicast traffic will flood all ports on the VLAN from which it originates. To control the multicast traffic without using IGMP, you would need to manually assign ports to the multicast group.   < ADMIN NOTE: Broken link has been removed from this post by Dell>

Networking General

Multicast isolated by VLANs.

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