Distributed switch NetFlow Service

The data stream service, also known as NetFlow, is a network protocol that collects IP traffic information as records and sends them to the Collector for traffic analysis, it is a new technology that is being gradually improved.

NetFlow provides network capacity planning, trend analysis, and data priority information for service providers and enterprises. This technology can also be used for IP-based billing applications and SLA validation services.

I. How NetFlow works: NetFlow first records the data of the initialized IP packet, such as the IP protocol type, service type (ToS), and interface ID. Then, to effectively match and count data, NetFlow allows subsequent data to be transmitted in the same data stream and uses their respective services, such as security filtering, QoS policies, and traffic planning. Real-time data is stored in the NetFlow cache and can be retrieved by reading operation commands.

2. On the basis of NetFlow, Cisco also proposed the NetFlow Policy Routing (NPR) technology. This Cisco IOS Service-based technology provides traffic planning and IP pre-classification functions, providing an efficient and high-performance NetFlow mechanism for policy routing.

Since it also supports the CEF architecture, it can be used on distributed platforms.

3. the NetFlow function of the distributed switch and the NetFlow collector tool can monitor application traffic and measure traffic performance over time. They can also help with capacity planning, make sure that I/O resources are allocated to the application according to the needs of different applications. If the IT administrator wants to monitor the performance of the application traffic running in the virtual environment, he can enable traffic monitoring in the distributed switch.

4. the NetFlow of the distributed switch can be enabled at the port group layer, individual port layer, or uplink link layer. When configuring NetFlow on the port layer, the administrator should select the NetFlow overwrite label, which ensures that the traffic can be monitored when NetFlow is disabled on the port group layer.

5. Different parameters that can be controlled during setup should be configured based on the information about the collector tool installed in your environment, advanced settings allow you to control traffic timeout and sampling rate. To change the amount of information collected for a certain traffic, you can change the sampling rate.

6. When you want to see the collector tool, which is part of a vds ip address, rather than being used as a separate host to manage all traffic information in the network IP address, vds ip Address Configuration is very useful. Because no vds ip address is entered, the collector tool provides traffic details for each host to manage network IP addresses.

7. The impact of the NetFlow function on the CPU depends entirely on the traffic volume in your environment and the traffic running rate. If you think your environment has a lot of traffic and are worried about CPU resources, you can use the control provided in NetFlow settings to select the traffic to be monitored. You can change the sampling rate or choose to monitor internal traffic only.

In addition, you can also enable or disable NetFlow for port groups or ports. As customers start to virtualize an application, they will need appropriate tools to manage the SLA requirements of these applications. The NetFlow function of the vSphere 5 platform can monitor these application flows and plan the capacity of network resources.