asked on Multicast MAC Addresses in VMware vSwitches
Hello,
We have 5 ESX Servers and vCenter server, both version 5.5. We use standard vSwitches on each ESX server and a bond (with 2 physical ethernet ports) on each server that we use to pass traffic for various VLANs.
I noticed that network packets sent to a multicast destination MAC addresss, are flooded to all the VMs connected to the same vSwitch on the same host.
Is there a way to configure the VMs or the vSwitch, so that packets sent to a particular multicast MAC address will be delivered only to some of the VMs? i.e. to assign a second MAC address on a VM via CLI, apart from the primary MAC assigned to the VM? or maybe we can achieve this by using a distributed virtual switch instead of the standard vSwitch?
We need multicast traffic for various clusters of systems (servers, firewalls, etc), so we can't really avoid it.
Thanks,
We have 5 ESX Servers and vCenter server, both version 5.5. We use standard vSwitches on each ESX server and a bond (with 2 physical ethernet ports) on each server that we use to pass traffic for various VLANs.
I noticed that network packets sent to a multicast destination MAC addresss, are flooded to all the VMs connected to the same vSwitch on the same host.
Is there a way to configure the VMs or the vSwitch, so that packets sent to a particular multicast MAC address will be delivered only to some of the VMs? i.e. to assign a second MAC address on a VM via CLI, apart from the primary MAC assigned to the VM? or maybe we can achieve this by using a distributed virtual switch instead of the standard vSwitch?
We need multicast traffic for various clusters of systems (servers, firewalls, etc), so we can't really avoid it.
Thanks,
VMwareVirtualizationSwitches / HubsNetworking
Last Comment
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
ASKER
Not causing a particular problem but since some of this traffic carries sensitive data, I'm wondering if there is a way to avoid this. Can we configure the hypervisor to deliver packets for a particular MAC address only to a specific VM?
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This is correct, and they will also be sent out to other ports, on physical switches and devices.
Is this causing you an issue ?
This is why some organisation disable multicast, because the are paranoid, that it impacts services!