Multicast and VMware

This post deals with Multicasting in VMware.

Lets see what multicast is and how it is deployed in VMware.

What is Multicasting ?

An alternate way of content delivery, where IP packet is sent to multiple destinations identified by a Multicast IP address. Multicasting is used for content delivery by Stock Exchanges, Video conferencing etc to multiple destinations at once.  

Multicast sends only one copy of the information along the network, whereby any duplication is at a point close to the recipients, consequently minimizing network bandwidth requirements.

For multicast the Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) is utilized in order for membership of the multicast group to be established and coordinated. This leads to single copies of information being sent to the multicast sources over the network. Hence it’s the network that takes responsibility for replicating and forwarding the information to multiple recipients.

By operating between the client and a local multicast router, IGMP utilises layer 2 switches with IGMP snooping and consequently derives the information regarding IGMP transactions. By being between the local and remote multicast routers, Multicast protocols such as PIM are then used to direct the traffic from the multicast server to the many multicast clients.

Multicasting and VMware

In the context of VMware and virtual switches there’s NO need for the vSwitches to perform IGMP snooping in order to recognize which VMs have IP multicast enabled. This is due to the ESX server having authoritative knowledge of the vNICs, so whenever a VM’s vNIC is configured for multicast the vSwitch automatically learns the multicast Ethernet group addresses associated with the VM. With the VMs using IGMP to join and leave multicast groups, the multicast routers send periodic membership queries while the ESX server allows these to pass through to the VMs. The VMs that have multicast subscriptions will in turn respond to the multicast router with their subscribed groups via IGMP membership reports.

 NOTE: IGMP snooping in this case is done by the usual physical Layer 2 switches in the network so that they can learn which interfaces require forwarding of multicast group traffic. 

So when the vSwitch receives multicast traffic, it forwards copies of the traffic to the subscribed VMs in a similar way to Unicast i.e. based on destination MAC addresses. With the responsibility of tracking which vNIC is associated with which multicast group lying with the vSwitch, packets are only delivered to the relevant VMs.

References and Credits: Chris Hendryx (it.toolbox.com).