Pim SM vs Pim Bidir

[udo.konstantin]

Hello,

I'm currently trying to find out when I should use SM or Bidir on given network.
There are also N7K involved with multicast streaming. I also noticed on F2 cards there is no support for PIM Bidir.
For this reason I want to find out is it possible to use Pim SM instead of Pim Bidir! Are there any "main" limitations to use Pim SM instead of SM?

Thanks
Udo

Sent from Cisco Technical Support iPad App

[Peter Paluch]

Hello Udo,

The Bidir-PIM is intended to be used in many-to-many scenarios, i.e. when you have a multicast group of receivers, significant portion of which are also senders to the same multicast group. With PIM-SM, this would lead to creation of numerous distribution trees, from each source either to the RP or directly to receivers. Bidir-PIM alleviates this by making sure that a multicast group has only a single shared distribution tree, regardless of how many senders are in the group. Using the Bidir-PIM in situations where there are only a few senders to a particular multicast group is not particularly advantageous - the PIM-SM would behave just fine.

So the better choice here ultimately depends on the nature of your multicasting.

Best regards,

Peter