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Understanding Storm Control

A traffic storm occurs when broadcast packets prompt receiving devices to broadcast packets in response. This prompts further responses, creating a snowball effect. The switch is flooded with packets, which creates unnecessary traffic that leads to poor performance or even a complete loss of service by some clients. Storm control causes a device to monitor traffic levels and take a specified action when a specified traffic level—called the storm control level—is exceeded, thus preventing packets from proliferating and degrading service. You can configure devices to drop broadcast and unknown unicast packets, shut down interfaces, or temporarily disable interfaces when the storm control level is exceeded.

Storm control is enabled by default on ELS platforms and disabled by default on non-ELS platforms. If storm control is enabled, the default level is 80 percent of the available bandwidth for ingress traffic. You can change the storm control level by configuring it as a specific bandwidth value. (The level configuration statement, which allows you to configure the storm control level as a percentage of the combined broadcast and unknown unicast streams, is deprecated and might be removed from future releases. We recommend that you phase out its use and replace it with the bandwidth statement.)

Note: Storm control is not enabled by default on MX platforms.

Note: When you configure storm control bandwidth, the value you configure is rounded off internally to the closest multiple of 64 Kbps, and the rounded-off value represents the bandwidth that is actually enforced. For example, if you configure a bandwidth limit of 150 Kbps, storm control enforces a bandwidth limit of 128 Kbps.

Note: On an FCoE-FC gateway, storm control must be disabled on all Ethernet interfaces that belong to an FCoE VLAN to prevent FCoE traffic from being dropped. Configuring storm control on an Ethernet interface that is included in an FCoE-FC gateway may have undesirable effects, including FCoE packet loss. After disabling storm control on all interfaces, enable storm control on any interfaces that are not part of an FCoE-FC gateway on which you want to use storm control. However, on an FCoE transit switch, you can enable storm control on interfaces that carry FCoE traffic.

Caution: The Junos OS allows you to configure a storm control value that exceeds the bandwidth of the interface. If you configure an interface this way, storm control does not drop broadcast or unknown unicast packets even if they consume all the available bandwidth.

To recognize a storm, you must be able to identify when traffic has reached an abnormal level. Suspect a storm when operations begin timing out and network response times slow down. Users might be unable to access expected services. Monitor the percentage of broadcast and unknown unicast traffic in the network when it is operating normally. This data can then be used as a benchmark to determine when traffic levels are too high. You can then configure storm control to set the level at which you want to drop broadcast and unknown unicast traffic.

 

Related Documentation

 

Published: 2014-10-14

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