User`s guide

96 XgOS User’s Guide September 2014
vNIC Mirroring
The Oracle Fabric Interconnect supports vNIC Mirroring, which is a feature that
enables duplicating data packets from one vNIC (the input) to a different output,
either another vNIC (mirror to vNIC) or a physical Ethernet port (mirror to port).
vNIC Mirroring is primarily used for troubleshooting, for example, to copy traffic off
of one or more vNICs and send the traffic to a sniffer where traffic can be analyzed.
Consider the example in the following figure..
The figure shows the two modes of vNIC Mirroring:
When mirroring to a port (1, shown by a dashed line), the vNIC “vn1.pubstest” is
terminated on the 10-Port GE module. This vNIC is the input vNIC. With a
mirror-to-port configuration, all the packets between the original source and
destination are forwarded as usual. However, an exact duplicate of the traffic flow
on “vn1.pubstest” is copied and sent to an output port, on which a separate
device (the sniffer “Tassadar”) is attached. Tassadar can then analyze all traffic on
the port.
When mirroring to a vNIC (2, shown by a solid blue line), the vNIC
“vn1.pubstest” is terminated on the 10-Port GE module. This vNIC is the input
vNIC. With a mirror-to-port configuration, all the packets between the original
source and destination are forwarded as usual. However, an exact duplicate of the
vnics 10
vlans none
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