To be able to effectively monitor traffic on a port channel, it is essential that each interface connected to a port channel receives both forward and reverse traffic flows. Normally, there is no guarantee that the forward and reverse traffic flows will use the same physical interface. However, when you enable symmetric hashing on the port channel, bidirectional traffic is forced to use the same physical interface and each physical interface in the port channel is effectively mapped to a set of flows.
When symmetric hashing is enabled, the parameters used for hashing, such as the source and destination IP address, are normalized before they are entered into the hashing algorithm. This process ensures that when the parameters are reversed (the source on the forward traffic becomes the destination on the reverse traffic), the hash output is the same. Therefore, the same interface is chosen.
Only the following load-balancing algorithms support symmetric hashing:
src-dst ip
src-dst ip-l4port
