ProCurve 26xx/28xx and HA Cluster

[Alessandro Baldoni]

I need to setup a HA cluster that has the following requirements:

1. All switches and routers in the broadcast domain must not block ARP requests if the response contains a multicast MAC address.
2. The switches that you directly attach to the cluster external and internal interfaces must be configured to forward traffic to all ports when the destination MAC address is a multicast MAC address.

While I'm able to do some basic configuration management on my ProCurve ProCurve 26xx/28xx switches, how can I check if they meet the above requirements?

Thank you for any help.
Alessandro

[Mohammed Faiz]

Hi,

What you've listed above is the default behaviour on the 2600/2800 series.
I'm not sure what option would block ARP requests but if you don't have "ip igmp" enabled in any VLAN then any multicast traffic in those VLANs will be flooded to all ports.
I can point you to some tools for generating multicast traffic if you're interested (I'll have to dig them out first ..)

[Alessandro Baldoni]

Mohammed,
Thank you for your answer I'd gladly take a look at the tools you'll suggest me.

[Mohammed Faiz · Accepted solution]

Ok, so mcast.exe can be used to generate and receive multicast data on a windows client.
You can get it here as part of the Windows Server toolkit:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9D467A69-57FF-4AE7-96EE-B18C4790CFFD&displaylang=en

That's useful for sending small amounts of multicast data if you're testing igmp snooping etc.

Basic format is:

mcast.exe /SEND /GRPS:239.192.1.1 /SRCS:192.168.1.20

More useful is VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/)
You can use this to both generate a long multicast stream and view it. I find the web view of HP switches useful for this as you can see the multicast traffic being flooded/pruned in real time while you stream the traffic.
Basic instructions here:

http://www.videolan.org/doc/streaming-howto/en/ch02.html

[Alessandro Baldoni]

Comments posted above answer the question.