Requirements and limitations for MAC-notification trap support

The following requirements and limitations apply to MAC-notification trap support:

  • MAC-notification is only supported on access ports.

  • The network administrator must ensure that there are no loops in the ports enabled for MAC-notification, because high volume and frequent MAC address movement is not expected on the access port.
  • The expected MAC scaling with the MAC-notification functionality is 800 MAC addresses per system, on the access ports where it is enabled. An extra buffer queue size is reserved to absorb any burst.
  • The MAC-notification could be bursty in nature. This could be due to a set of hosts that could join at a specific time or a security policy change that could move a set of MAC addresses from one VLAN to another. Such bursty events need to be queued, resulting in delayed notifications to the management software.
  • The number of events that can be queued is finite.
  • All queued events are notified during the notification interval. The notification interval should be tuned based on the requirements of the enterprise. However, a very aggressive timer coupled with bursty traffic could load the system and result in a loss of MAC-notification events.
  • Static and control MAC events are not considered for MAC-notification event generation.
  • MAC-notification is supported at an interface level on a device. When enabled, each MAC address addition or deletion is logged as an event in a buffer-queue.
  • MAC-notification is currently not supported on MCT (Multi Chassis Trunking).
Parent topic: SNMP MAC-notification trap support