Thursday, January 08, 2009

CEF and unequal traffic sharing

Today I stumbled across a Cisco switch where the layer 3 CEF switching resulted in an unequal sharing of the outgoing load. The incoming traffic is from a Fortigate router which handles load sharing differently.

First I looked into the routing table and verified that I have two active routes to the destination.

Switch#sho ip ro 192.168.1.1
Routing entry for 192.168.1.0/24
  Known via "ospf 1", distance 110, metric 10, type extern 2, forward metric 1
  Last update from 10.47.1.1 on Vlan3800, 2w2d ago
  Routing Descriptor Blocks:
  * 172.30.254.249, from 10.47.1.1, 2w2d ago, via Vlan3800
      Route metric is 10, traffic share count is 1
    172.30.254.241, from 10.48.1.1, 2w2d ago, via Vlan200
      Route metric is 10, traffic share count is 1

I then looked into CEF.

Switch#sho ip cef 192.168.1.1 internal
192.168.1.0/24, epoch 1, RIB, refcount 6, per-destination sharing

The destination here is 192.168.1.0/24 - and it seems like Cisco is sending everything to that destination out on only one interface. Investigating further I found this command that also confirms this. (Run it several times!)

Switch#sho ip cef exact-route 10.0.0.1 192.168.1.1
10.0.0.1 -> 192.168.1.1 => IP adj out of Vlan3800, addr 10.47.1.1

I went looking on the Internet and found a great resource on Cisco and CEF on Cisco IOS hints and tricks.

Unfortunately, I did not find a solution that helped me.

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