Multicast config on 4500-E, How to?

admin_2 · ‎12-19-2008

I have a customer with a 4500E switch in the headend of their elementary school. We have just installed several video streaming servers that support unicast or multicast streaming.

We would like to configure the switch for multicast but are not sure how to proceed.

In another case with layer 2 switches (2950) and a router (2620XM) we enabled multicast routing on the 2620XM, enabled sparse mode on interface fa0/0, set the rendevous point to fa0/0 and enableb CGMP on fa0/0. Then we executed the following on the 2950s:

ip igmp snooping vlan1 mrouter learn cgmp

In the case of this 4500E, though, I am not as clear on the requirements. If anyone would be kind enough to explain the correct settings, I would be grateful.

Report Inappropriate Content · ‎12-28-2008

The implementation of IP multicast on the Catalyst 4500 series switch is an extension of centralized Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF). CEF extracts information from the unicast routing table, which is created by unicast routing protocols, such as BGP, OSPF, and EIGR and loads it into the hardware Forwarding Information Base (FIB). With the unicast routes in the FIB, when a route is changed in the upper-layer routing table, only one route needs to be changed in the hardware routing state. To forward unicast packets in hardware, the Integrated Switching Engine looks up source and destination routes in ternary content addressable memory (TCAM), takes the adjacency index from the hardware FIB, and gets the Layer 2 rewrite information and next-hop address from the hardware adjacency table.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/lan/catalyst4500/12.2/31sga/configuration/guide/mcastmls.html#wp1147914