Mirroring Overview

The mirroring feature allows the network administrator to replicate all traffic arriving and/or leaving the selected system interfaces. This data can be used for collection or analysis.

The traffic replicated using the mirroring feature can be sent to a separate interface on the same switch as the traffic source for analysis or inspection. Such a collection of interfaces and settings is called a mirror session.

A mirror session can be configured with many traffic sources but only a single output, or destination. In the initial configuration, the mirror session is disabled. The administrator has to enable the feature to start the replication.

CAUTION:

Care must be taken in choosing the number and rates of sources to avoid over-saturating a session destination. A mirror session with multiple 10G sources can overwhelm a single 10G destination and important data may be lost.