Protocol Independent Multicast over IPv6

Table 1. PIM over IPv6 product support

Feature

Product

Release introduced

PIM over IPv6

5320 Series

Fabric Engine 8.6

5420 Series

VOSS 8.4

5520 Series

VOSS 8.2.5

5720 Series

Fabric Engine 8.7

Note

Note

PIM is supported in Global Routing Table (GRT) only.

Several multicast protocols are used to enable IP multicast.

Hosts use the Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) for IPv4 and Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD v1/v2) for IPv6 to report multicast group memberships of directly attached multicast listeners to neighboring multicast routers. MLD is the direct IPv6 replacement for the IGMP protocol used in IPv4.

Routers use Protocol Independent Multicast-Sparse Mode (PIM-SM) and PIM source Specific Mode (SSM) to exchange multicast routing information. The PIM-SM protocol is the multicast routing protocol that uses the underlying unicast routing information base to build unidirectional shared trees to group members rooted at the RP per group, and creates shortest-path trees (SPT) per source. The router forwards multicast packets along these trees. PIM-SSM does not require RP and only supports SPT.

PIM over IPv6 uses the IPv6 unicast routing table for reverse path information about source and RP.

Note

Note

IPv4 and IPv6 multicast streams cannot interact. To configure an end-to-end PIM IPv6 network, all nodes from sender to receiver must support PIM IPv6.