vPC peer-gateway on Nexus 7k

[tommy.duong]

Hi, can anyone please elaborate of how packets will be forwarding if peer-gateway is NOT enable on vPC for Nexus 7k pair? can we still have active/active path forwarding?

[Marwan ALshawi]

vPC Peer Gateway  allows vPC interoperability with some network attached storage (NAS) or load balancer devices that do not perform a typical default gateway ARP request at boot up. vPC Peer Gateway allows a vPC peer device to act as the active gateway for packets addressed to the other peer device router MAC. It keeps the forwarding of traffic local to the vPC peer device and avoids use of the peerlink (by not bridging the traffic to the other vPC peer device).

Hope this helps

[canero]

A similar discussion is as below:

https://supportforums.cisco.com/message/3989694#3989694

As addition , basically if peer-gateway is not used, the same packet may use the peer-link and be routed by the active hsrp device, which increases the load and the number of switched hops of the packet which may be a performance consideration.  With a good design, under normal conditions peer-link is basically used for control traffic, no data traffic passes through peer-link besides non-vpc orphan links. Can't think of any scenarios where it may be more suitable not to use this command with hsrp.

https://supportforums.cisco.com/thread/2156774

Regards,