Load-Balancing Methods in Cisco ACI Fabric

Multidestination Traffic Load-Balancing Method

Question

Which method does the Cisco ACI fabric use to load-balance multidestination traffic?

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Explanations

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https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/aci/apic/sw/1-x/aci-fundamentals/b_ACI-Fundamentals/b_ACI-Fundamentals_chapter_010010.html

The Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) fabric uses a distributed forwarding architecture to handle all traffic forwarding within the fabric. This distributed architecture enables optimal forwarding of traffic across the fabric by utilizing various load-balancing techniques.

For multidestination traffic, such as broadcast, multicast, and unknown unicast traffic, Cisco ACI fabric uses a load-balancing technique called "multicast tree" or "multicast forwarding tree." This technique involves creating a tree structure to forward traffic to all the destinations.

When the fabric receives multidestination traffic, it uses the multicast tree to determine the path that the traffic should take to reach all the destinations. The multicast tree is created dynamically based on the network topology and is optimized for the best path to each destination.

The multicast tree is created using the "Reverse Path Forwarding" (RPF) algorithm, which ensures that the traffic is forwarded only on valid paths and avoids loops. The RPF algorithm identifies the source of the multicast traffic and then determines the shortest path to each destination, taking into account the network topology and available paths.

Once the multicast tree is created, the fabric uses it to load-balance the multidestination traffic across all the available paths. This ensures that the traffic is evenly distributed across the network and that there is no congestion or overutilization of any single path.

In summary, the Cisco ACI fabric uses a multicast tree to load-balance multidestination traffic, which is created using the RPF algorithm and optimized for the best path to each destination.