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:
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
For information about commands and supported parameters to configure traffic mirroring, see ExtremeCloud Orchestrator Command Reference, 3.3.1 .