Storm-Control Commands

This section describes commands used to configure storm-control and view storm-control configuration information. A traffic storm is a condition that occurs when incoming packets flood the LAN, which creates performance degradation in the network. The Storm-Control feature protects against this condition.

200 Series provides broadcast, multicast, and unicast story recovery for individual interfaces. Unicast Storm-Control protects against traffic whose MAC addresses are not known by the system. For broadcast, multicast, and unicast storm-control, if the rate of traffic ingressing on an interface increases beyond the configured threshold for that type, the traffic is dropped.

To configure storm-control, you will enable the feature for all interfaces or for individual interfaces, and you will set the threshold (storm-control level) beyond which the broadcast, multicast, or unicast traffic will be dropped. The Storm-Control feature allows you to limit the rate of specific types of packets through the switch on a per-port, per-type, basis.

Configuring a storm-control level also enables that form of storm-control. Disabling a storm-control level (using the “no” version of the command) sets the storm-control level back to the default value and disables that form of storm-control. Using the “no” version of the “storm-control” command (not stating a “level”) disables that form of storm-control but maintains the configured “level” (to be active the next time that form of storm-control is enabled.)

Note

The actual rate of ingress traffic required to activate storm-control is based on the size of incoming packets and the hard-coded average packet size of 512 bytes - used to calculate a packet-per-second (pps) rate - as the forwarding-plane requires pps versus an absolute rate kbps. For example, if the configured limit is 10%, this is converted to ~25000 pps, and this pps limit is set in forwarding plane (hardware). You get the approximate desired output when 512bytes packets are used.