Traffic Mirroring Overview

XCO supports traffic monitoring on both Clos and non-Clos (small data center) fabrics for troubleshooting issues with applications and fabrics. XCO performs traffic monitoring by means of packet mirroring in a cloud-native infrastructure solution and network functions virtualization in infrastructure deployments.

You can mirror the ingress and egress traffic from the following ports:

There are two types of traffic mirroring:
  1. In-band traffic mirroring
  2. Out-of-band traffic mirroring

The following table describes the comparison between In-band and Out-of-band traffic mirroring solution:

In-band Mirroring Out-of-band Mirroring
No additional hardware or ports One additional switch, one reserved port on all leaf and border leaf switches
All configuration by XCO, no separate devices to be managed Separate configuration on mirror switch through OOB mechanisms
All ingress information, including test access point (TAP) and VLAN, can be retained and used for classification Ingress port information and possibly VLAN information, is not retained
Fabric needs to be measured for expected extra mirror traffic Mirroring traffic has minimal impact on normal traffic and fabric capacity, no extra measurement needed
All functionality needs to be present in ingress leaf top of rack (ToR) switch Minimal configuration needed on XCO, and dataplane support needed in the fabric
Extra tunnel configuration in fabric underlay Fabric underlay is unmodified
Configuration of underlay tunnels to sink app breaks underlay/overlay separation Tunnels to sink apps are outside the domain of fabric, and do not overlap
Cannot be applied for control port mirroring Partial reuse possible for a common mirroring solution also on control network
Fabric has to be programmed for creating additional headers and remote destination reachability, underlay or overlay separation is lost No fabric dependency on final encapsulation and forwarding toward sink
Egress ACL rule support minimal Two level filtering possible, once in ingress switch, and once in the dedicated mirror switch, More complicated mirror rules can be cascaded.
QoS support needed on tenant and mirrored traffic streams because they share the same fabric links No QoS support needed, because links are separate
Cannot be leveraged for troubleshooting fabric issues due to reliance on fabric Can be leveraged for troubleshooting fabric issues
Fabric admin needs to do all configuration because underlay routing modifications are needed XCO tenant admin can create TAP sessions on the fabric switches, with pre-provisioning and custom provisioning of the configuration on mirror switch by fabric admin.
Note

Note

For information about commands and supported parameters to configure traffic mirroring, see ExtremeCloud Orchestrator Command Reference, 3.2.0 .