Need help to deploy IP Multicast in private network

[mbowman01]

Hi,

I am currently working on a project where there is an urgent requirement to deliver an IP multicast solution.

The network itself is fairly simple.

IP Cameras as connected to pairs of Catalyst 2960 switches in 'access nodes'. There are 8 cameras per node, 4 on each switch. There are multiple nodes, 3 at the moment in our testing environment, all trunked together, so 24 cameras in total.

The Catalyst 2960 switches are trunking to a Core node, which consists of a pair of Catalyst 3750 switches with MHSRP configured for each of 8 VLANs, with 2 DCs and 2 Video storage servers for storing camera footage attached to access ports on those switches. We also have workstations attached to the core node switches which have software installed to view live images and manage the cameras across the network.

We have no routing - the access switches have default gateways pointing to the VLANs SVIs configured on the core switch, and each function has its on VLAN. InterVLAN routing is enabled on the 3750s and connectivity is working fine.

I wish to send a TCP stream to the Video Storage servers for storage, and to multicast to the workstations so that the software can see multiple streams from multiple cameras.

Could someone please suggest a suitable deployment strategy, including how to configure the cameras and switches appropriately to allow this to happen? I am struggling to understand what type of configuration is required.

Much appreciated. I'm actively viewing this thread for assistance.

[mbowman01]

Hi Jon,

This config is within a test environment which will be replicated dozens of times to other sites, so any upgrades we need to do is multiplied by the number of switches we need to upgrade. I'm pretty sure the cost of those license upgrades will prohibit that so I am hoping to try and find a solution within the limitations of the equipment we have.

I do appreciate your help and I understand it's an awkward setup to work with without IPservices.

Martin

[paul driver]

Hello Martin/Jon

Reading your posts you seem very restricted in terms of choices provided by Jon, so not sure if this will applicable or not.

You could possibly try enabling igmp snooping of the L2 switches for the sepcifc vlans

ip igmp snooping

ip igmp snooping vlan xx

Then on the L3 switches SVI's apply pim-dense mode -  although these are implict mc messages by dense mode they should reach all host on all vlans and then you may be able to restrict MC Hosts on the various vlans from joining specific MC groups via an acl .

access 1 deny 224.8.8.8

access 1 deny 224.9.9.9

access 1 deny 224.x.x.x etc....

acces 1 permit any

ip multicast-routing distributed

int vlan xxx

ip pim-dence mode

ip igmp access-group 1

What do you think?

res

Paul

Please don't forget to rate any posts that have been helpful.

Thanks.

[Jon Marshall]

Paul

I don't think IP Base supports any PIM mode other than PIM stub routing (unless you know otherwise) so your solution wouldn't work. Or perhaps i am not understanding ?

Martin

I think the only way forward is to test what we have already covered.

I didn't realise this was a test environment so at least you can try all things out without worrying about the production network.

The thread i linked to suggested that you can get the routing working even without a L3 device capable of running full multicast routing but at the moment the question concerns those extra commands you can't enter. Can you verify they are not available in config mode ?

An additional problem is because PIM is passive on the SVIs no IGMP queries are being made so there is no way for the switches to work out which ports needs the multicast stream and so it will be flooded.

There is a function, supported on the 3750s called the IGMP querier function which allows the switch to make IGMP queries per vlan without PIM enabled. We may be able to use this but i have absolutely no idea how it will work with the L3 multicast routing config.

I recommend you try and get multicast routing working first. If you can get to the stgae where you can send a multicast stream from one vlan to another then you should be able to use wireshark to then see each port in the destination vlan receiving the stream (even when you don't want it to).

If you can get to that stage we can then try the IGMP snooping querier to see if we can restrict the stream to only those ports that need to receive it. It may be we can't in which case -

a) you could statically configure the multicast mac address to the relevant ports but this is no scalable and does not allow clients to dynamically join and leave the multicast group

or

b) simply allow the stream to be flooded to all ports within the destination vlan. Not ideal and kind of defeats the purpose of multicast but you may have no choice.

I doubt whether any of this would be supported by Cisco though as i think their position would be to simply upgrade to an IP Services license although in understand this may not be possible for you because of cost.

Jon

[Jon Marshall]

Martin

Can you confirm whether or not those commands you could not enter were done in config mode ?

Jon

[Jon Marshall]

Martin

I'll do some more reading on this tonight or tomorrow morning but we may just have to try multiple test secnarios to see if we can get it to work.

Jon

[mbowman01]

Hi guys,

Thanks very much for the information. I've been doing a bit of reading myself and I have also reached out to some other guys, and everyone seems to be of the same opinion - I'll need to upgrade the switch images to IP Services in order to have a multicast configuration.

I'm having another look at this today so I'll let you know my findings.

Martin

[Jon Marshall]

Martin

Thanks for getting back to us on this.

If you could upgrade to IP Services it would certainly make your job a lot easier

Jon