Multicast in a switched network

Ahmed Elnagar · ‎10-27-2007

Hello all;

I have two 6509 switches acting as a core backbones for a campus network, to which is a big number of 3560 switches is connected.

The customer wants to use IPTV system that uses multicast to deliver TV stations. I have read alot about multicast but I still confused what should I configure on my network to allow this to run is it MVR or igmp snooping or what?? and what is the configuration required on the backbones and the edge swithces.

by the way the source multicast server is in a different vlan than the receiver, and it is directly connected to the backbone switch

thanks

Jon Marshall · ‎10-28-2007

Hi

In brief you need to

1) enable IGMP snooping on all the relevant catalyst switches.

2) If you need to route multicast traffic between vlans then you need to

i) turn on multicast routing "ip multicast-routing"

ii) Enable PIM sparse or dense mode on the vlan interfaces that you want to route between.

I would go with dense mode to start off with to test as with sparse-mode there is additional config.

HTH

Jon