Group Table

The group table introduces the ability to add support for port group abstraction for multipathing. This enables OpenFlow to represent a set of ports as a single entity for forwarding packets.

The group table supports the following group types:

  • All: Executes all the buckets in the group; mostly used for flooding and multicasting.
  • Indirect: Executes one defined bucket in the group. The action taken by this group type is sending packets to the next hop.
  • Select: Executes one bucket in the group. The action bucket is chosen by a switch-defined algorithm, such as round robin or hashing (for example, load sharing).
  • Fast failover: Executes the first live bucket; used in cases such as redundancy.

A group table consists of group entries. The counters in the following table are available in a group entry.

Group Entry Counters

Counter Description
Group Identifier A 32-bit unsigned integer uniquely identifying the group
Group type Determines group semantics
Counter Number of packets processed by a group
Action bucket

Ordered list of action buckets, where each action bucket contains a set of actions to execute and associated parameters

In this section:

  1. Scaling Group Numbers
    The output of the show openflow groups command displays the maximum number of actions in a bucket, the maximum number of buckets in a group, and the maximum number of groups for scaling the group in OpenFlow.
  2. Considerations and Limitations for Group Tables
    You must take into account a number of considerations and limitations when you configure group tables for OpenFlow flows.
  3. Group Events
    The following group events are supported by OpenFlow:
Parent topic: OpenFlow v1.3.0