Data Sheet

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) BGP is an exterior routing protocol used in large-scale networks to transport routing information between
autonomous systems (AS). As an interdomain routing protocol, BGP is used when AS path information is
required to provide partial or full Internet routing downstream. The switch supports BGP version 4. The fol-
lowing BGP features are supported:
• Proprietary BGP MIB support for reporting status variables and internal counters.
• Additional route map support: Match as-path; Set as-path; Set local-preference; Set metric
• Support for inbound and outbound neighbor-specific route maps.
• Handles the BGP RTO full condition.
• Support for the show ip bgp command.
• Support for the show ip bgp trac command.
• Support for the bgp always-compare-med command.
• Support for the maximum number of BGP neighbors: 128.
• A prefix list is supported to filter the output of the show ip bgp command.
• Configurable maximum length of a received AS_PATH.
• Show command to list the routes accepted from a specific neighbor.
• Show command to list the routes rejected from a specific neighbor.
• Support for BGP communities.
• Support for IPv6.
• IPv6 Transport and Prefix list
• Support for BGP peer templates to simplify neighbor configuration.
VLAN Routing • M4500 supports VLAN routing. You can also configure the soware to allow trac on a VLAN to be
treated as if the VLAN were a router port.
IP Configuration • M4500 IP configuration settings to allow you to configure network information for VLAN routing
interfaces such as IP address and subnet mask, MTU size, and ICMP redirects. Global IP configuration
settings for the switch allow you to enable or disable the generation of several types of ICMP messages
and enable or disable the routing mode.
Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) Table Management • You can create static ARP entries and manage many settings for the dynamic ARP table, such as age time
for entries, retries, and cache size.
BOOTP/DHCP Relay Agent • The switch BOOTP/DHCP Relay Agent feature relays BOOTP and DHCP messages between DHCP clients
and DHCP servers that are located in dierent IP subnets.
IP Helper and UDP Relay • The IP Helper and UDP Relay features provide the ability to relay various protocols to servers on a dierent
subnet.
Routing Table • The routing table displays information about the routes that have been dynamically learned. You can
configure static and default routes and route preferences. A separate table shows the routes that have
been manually configured.
Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) • VRRP provides hosts with redundant routers in the network topology without any need for the hosts to
reconfigure or know that there are multiple routers. If the primary (master) router fails, a secondary router
assumes control and continues to use the virtual router IP (VRIP) address. VRRP Route Interface Tracking
extends the capability of VRRP to allow tracking of specific route/interface IP states within the router that
can alter the priority level of a virtual router for a VRRP group.
Algorithmic Longest Prefix Match (ALPM) •Algorithmic Longest Prefix Match (ALPM) is a protocol used by routers to select an entry from a
forwarding table. When an exact match is not found in the forwarding table, the match with the longest
subnet mask, also called longest prefix match, is chosen. It is called the longest prefix match because it is
also the entry where the largest number of leading address bits of the destination address match those
in the table entry.ALPM enables support for large number of routes. (For BGP, 32k IPv4 routes and 24k
IPv6 are supported.) The SDM template, “dual-ipv4-and-ipv6 alpm” is available to accommodate a large
number of routes.
Bidirectional Forwarding Detection • Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) is presented as a service to its user applications, providing the
options to create and destroy a session with a peer device and reporting upon the session status. On the
switch, OSPF and BGP can use BFD for monitoring of their neighbors’ availability in the network and for
fast detection of connection faults with them.
100GE-Enabled Managed Switches Data Sheet
M4500 series
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