About Broadcast and Multicast Routing

Broadcast and multicast in a Fibre Channel fabric uses the concept of a distribution tree to reach all switches in the fabric.

FSPF provides the topology information to compute the distribution tree. Fibre Channel defines 256 multicast groups and one broadcast address for each VSAN. Switches in the Cisco MDS 9000 Family only use broadcast routing. By default, they use the principal switch as the root node to derive a loop-free distribution tree for multicast and broadcast routing in a VSAN.

Caution

All switches in the fabric should run the same multicast and broadcast distribution tree algorithm to ensure the same distribution tree.

To interoperate with other vendor switches (following FC-SW3 guidelines), the Cisco SAN-OS and Cisco NX-OS Release 4.1(1b) and later releases uses the lowest domain switch as the root to compute the multicast tree in interop mode.

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