How Port Mirroring Works; What Happens To The Mirroring Port - Alcatel OmniSwitch 6600 Family Network Configuration Manual

Omniswitch 6600 series

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Diagnosing Switch Problems

How Port Mirroring Works

When a frame is received on a mirrored port, it is copied and sent to the mirroring port. The received

frame is actually transmitted twice across the switch backplane–once for normal bridging and then again

to the mirroring port.

When a frame is transmitted by the mirrored port, a copy of the frame is made, tagged with the mirroring

port as the destination, and sent back over the switch backplane to the mirroring port. The diagram below

illustrates the data flow between the mirrored and mirroring ports.

Note that when port mirroring is enabled, there may be some performance degradation, since all frames

received and transmitted by the mirrored port need to be copied and sent to the mirroring port.

(Active) Port

(w/ Incoming &

Outgoing Frames)

When you set up port mirroring and attach cables to the mirrored and mirroring ports, the mirroring port

remains enabled and part of the Bridging Spanning Tree until you protect it from Spanning Tree updates

by specifying an unblocked VLAN as part of the configuration command line. The mirroring port does not

transmit or receive any traffic on its own.

OmniSwitch 6600 Family Network Configuration Guide

OmniSwitch 6648

Relationship between Mirrored and Mirroring Ports

Port Mirroring

(Monitoring) Port

(w/ Copied Incoming

& Outgoing Frames)

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