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    <title>About Broadcast and Multicast Routing </title>
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<a name="wp1074669"> </a><h1 class="pTitle">
About Broadcast and Multicast Routing

</h1>
<a name="wp1074670"> </a><p class="pBody">
Broadcast and multicast in a Fibre Channel fabric uses the concept of a distribution tree to reach all 
switches in the fabric. 

</p>
<a name="wp1074671"> </a><p class="pBody">
FSPF provides the topology information to compute the distribution tree. Fibre Channel defines 256 
multicast groups and one broadcast address for each VSAN. Switches in the Cisco MDS 9000 Family 
only use broadcast routing. By default, they use the principal switch as the root node to derive a loop-free 
distribution tree for multicast and broadcast routing in a VSAN.

</p>
<a name="wp1074674"> </a><p class="pCaution">
<table border="0">
<tr>
<td>
<strong>Caution	&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</strong>
</td>
<td>
<p>All switches in the fabric should run the same multicast and broadcast distribution tree algorithm to 
ensure the same distribution tree.
</p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>

</p>
<a name="wp1074675"> </a><p class="pBody">
To interoperate with other vendor switches (following FC-SW3 guidelines), the Cisco SAN-OS and 
Cisco NX-OS Release 4.1(1b) and later releases uses the lowest domain switch as the root to compute 
the multicast tree in interop mode.

</p>
<hr /><br><p class="pBody">Copyright 2010-2013, Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.</p> 

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