Reference Guide

448 | Multicast Features
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Optimize the E-Series for Multicast Traffic
Optimize the E-Series for Multicast Traffic is supported only on platform: e
The default hardware settings for the E-series are for unicast applications like data centers and ISP
networks. This means that the E-Series gives priority to unicast data forwarding rather than multicast data
forwarding. For multicast intensive applications like trading, Dell Networking recommends reconfiguring
some default settings.
You may do one or more for the following to optimize the E-Series for your multicast application:
• Tune the Central Scheduler for Multicast
• Allocate More Buffer Memory for Multicast WRED
• Allocate More Bandwidth to Multicast using Egress WFQ
Allocate More Buffer Memory for Multicast WRED
Allocate more buffer memory to multicast WRED (Weighted Random Early Detection) for bursty
multicast traffic that might temporarily become oversubscribed. For example, the example WRED profile
in Figure 30-14 allocates multicast traffic a minimum of 40 megabytes (out of 80 megabytes) of buffer
memory and up to 60 megabytes.
Figure 23-5. Allocating More Bandwidth for Multicast WRED
Allocate More Bandwidth to Multicast using Egress WFQ
Egress Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ) determines per port the ratio of egress bandwidth allocated to
multicast, replication, and unicast traffic. By default, FTOS provides 1/64 to multicast, 1/64 to replication,
and 62/64 for unicast, which is shared between 8 unicast queues. Allocate more bandwidth for multicast
using the command
queue egress multicast linecard (from CONFIGURATION mode) with the keyword
bandwidth-percent. For example, allocate 80% of egress bandwidth to multicast on all line cards using the
command
queue egress multicast linecard all bandwidth-percent 80.
Tune the Central Scheduler for Multicast
The Central Scheduler is responsible for scheduling unicast and multicast packets via the Terabit
backplane. The default configuration of the Central Scheduler is optimized for network environments that
forward primarily unicast traffic—80% of the scheduler weight is for unicast traffic and 20% is for
multicast traffic.
FTOS(Conf)#queue egress multicast linecard all wred-profile Egress
FTOS(conf)#wred-profile Egress
FTOS(conf-wred)# threshold min 40960 max 61440