As network grows getting complete network visibility has always been a challenge to the network administrators. Brocade switches help the network administrators achieve this using the SFlow technology

As network grows
getting complete network visibility has always been a challenge to the network
administrators. Brocade switches help the network administrators achieve this
using the SFlow technology. Now having SFlow alone in the switch is not enough,
you need a monitoring tool which can represent the data available in these
SFlow packets in a graphical way. Here comes the use of NetFlow Analyzer.
NetFlow Analyzer helps in monitoring Sflow data from Brocade. SFlow monitoring
does random sampling and sends the sampled packet to NetFlow Analyzer.

Now lets see how SFlow is enabled in
Brocade switches, given below are the commands:

Below given commands enable SFlow
monitoring on all interfaces of the Brocade switch, sampling rate is set to 1
out of 512. Also, the polling counter are set to every 30 seconds. The packets
are sent to NetFlow Analyzer server (server IP 192.168.1.1) on the default port
9996 (UDP port).

Brocade (config)# int e 0/1/1 to 0/1/24

Brocade (config-mif-0/1/1-0/1/24)# sflow
forwarding

Brocade (config-mif-0/1/1-0/1/24)# exit

Brocade (config)# sflow destination
192.168.1.1 9996

Brocade (config)# sflow sample 512

Brocade (config)# sflow polling-interval 30

Brocade (config)# sflow enable

Once we have enabled SFlow in the brocade
switches and flows are sent to the NetFlow Analyzer. NetFlow Analyzer will
automatically detect the switch and will display the data for you.

To view the configuration you can make use
of the command given below:

Brocade # show sflow

Also, selecting the appropriate sampling rate is
important for accuracy in Brocade switches.

The above mentioned values of sampling
rates that have worked fine in our customer Networks. If you feel the bandwidth used by these SFlow packets is high, you can always decrease the sampling
rate. That is 1 out of 5000 instead of using 1 out of 2000 in a 10 Gb/s
interface.

This way, you could use SFlow
technology for networks that use Brocade switches for getting complete
visibility.

Download the 30 day trial from here.

Praveen Manohar
NetFlow Analyzer
Technical Team

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The original article/video can be found at Network Visibility using SFlow in Brocade switches