I have a lab situation where we would really benefit from being able to get multicast receivers in one VRF to join multicast sources in a different VRF, all on the same router, probably an ASR9K. We've thought of a couple ways to do this. One is to offload the source VRF to another box and then use subinterfaces on the trunk links with each subinterface in a different VRF. That would work just fine, but it would mean that each new receiver VRF would increase the bandwidth usage on the trunk. We'd end up with the same multicast streams being duplicated several times over on those links.
Another method would be to just run cables between the VRFs. That would work well, but it would eat up ports quickly, especially since we'll probably need a few gig per VRF. I'd really like to find a way to do this within the box. I've already gotten unicast to work by using BGP to redistribute between the VRFs in a sort of VRF Lite configuration. However, I can't get multicast to work across the VRF boundaries. MDT doesn't seem like an option because I'm not doing mpls and this is all happening within one box, not from PE to PE or anything like that, and we're trying to go from one VRF to another, which I don't think MDT would allow us to do. It sure seems like there should be a way to make this work, but I'm not that familiar with VRFs, and I'm definitely not that familiar with trying to do multicast across VRFs. In the end, we don't even need unicast redistribution at all. We want to have separate VRFs for each virtual lab, and those VRFs just need to be able to pull multicast sources from the source VRF. There will be no unicast traffic at all. This is purely for a lab environment at work for testing various video encoding/compression systems. We wouldn't be thinking of attempting this in a production environment, but it sure would solve some problems for us if we could pull it off in the lab area. Any thoughts? Thanks! John _______________________________________________ cisco-nsp mailing list [email protected] https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/
