Port Mirroring Considerations and Restrictions

Although you can configure the switch to monitor both ingress and egress traffic, some restrictions apply:

Port Mirroring Resources

Port mirroring resources are limited to four ports simultaneously (where each mirroring direction counts as one). For example, if two mirroring ports are designated to mirror both ingress and egress traffic then all four mirroring ports are consumed.

Port mirroring shares these four resources with other applications such as port mirroring RSPAN, Fabric Extend, Application Telemetry, IPFIX, and ACL with mirror action. Each one of these applications consumes at least one port mirroring resource. (port mirroring RSPAN consumes two if you configure both Ingress and Egress modes.)
Important

Important

To enable any one of the preceding applications, you must have at least one free mirroring resource. If all four port mirroring resources are already in use, the switch displays a Resource not available error message when you try to enable the application.

The VSP 8600 Series uses the four reserved resources for port mirroring and ACLs that have a mirroring action. For the other applications, this restriction does not apply because the VSP 8600 Series uses mirroring resources that do not come out of the four reserved port mirroring resources.

If you receive a Resource not available error message, you can use the show mirror-resources command to view information about mirror resource usage. For more information, see Displaying Mirror Resource Usage.

The show mirror-resources command is not available on all platforms. Use CLI command completion Help to determine if the command is available on your switch.