Cisco Catalyst 6500-E Series Manual page 21

Switch as the backbone of a unified access campus architecture

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Figure 21.

The Flexible NetFlow Model

As Figure 21 shows, the Flexible NetFlow model is composed of three main components: flow exporters, flow

records, and flow monitors. The flow exporter is simply the destination to which the NetFlow V9 encapsulated

records will be sent. Notice that multiple flow exporters can be defined for the system, that multiple flow exporters

can be used with a single flow monitor, and that flow exporters can be defined for every VRF in the system. This

gives organizations with varying customer bases the ability to meet the needs of those customers to have

independent flow collectors relevant to their own requirements.

Flow records contain the information that the network administrator wants to gather about each flow traversing the

interface. Flow records contain two different types of fields: primary fields and nonprimary fields. Primary fields are

unique attributes that help the system determine if the packet information is unique or similar to other packets. If a

packet is unique, then a new entry is created in the NetFlow ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) of the

forwarding engine. If an entry is not unique, then no new entry is created, and the existing entry is updated.

Figure 22 shows an example of this operation.

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