Challenge in port mirroring configuration on Cisco switch connected to VC

[chuckk281]

Ramu had a customer question:

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Hi Champs

Need your help,.

We are working on a large customer requirement where production network traffic needs to be mirrored to another chassis through Cisco external switch. Customer is not interested in doing port mirroring on VC level as he needs to send data to VM in separate Chassis.

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Reply from Vincent:

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You already have the proper solution: put the analyzer on a rack server, not on a blade connected to VC modules.

VC will never forward Ethernet unicast frames to a blade server when it knows the destination MAC address in the frame resides elsewhere than the blade server in question. All you could get captured on the blade server is broadcast frames and unicast frames where the destination MAC is unknown to VC, or is the blade server itself.

You just CANNOT put a network analyzer on a blade server connected to VC to capture traffic coming from the outside, there is no configuration that can make it work.

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