FabricPath - CE VLANs with conversational mac learning

Dominic_Foley

Dear community,

I've been looking at various things FP / STP and noticed that a CE vlan can be configured for conversational mac learning.

Thing I can't quite grasp is the benefit of this, and how that would interoperate?

Hope not too daft a question :-)

Many Thanks

Dominic

MarkDotDK

Conversational MAC learning for CE VLAN's makes the switch only learn MAC addresses that are actually "talking" to the interface, meaning that won't learn anything until it sees two-way traffic. Enabling conversational MAC learning is a matter of being able to scale the network to a larger number of connected hosts, since it doesn't need to learn each and every MAC address.

Cisco describes it as a "three-way handshake" at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/datacenter/sw/6_x/nx-os/fabricpath/configuration/guide/fp_overview.html#wp1074220. There is a (very) short description of it there.

/Mark

 

 

Dominic_Foley

Thanks Mark. Appreciated.