Multicast Routing and Solaris Bandwidth Manager

In server mode, Solaris Bandwidth Manager does not distinguish between multicast and other types of traffic. However, if you are using Solaris Bandwidth Manager in IP-transparent mode, it is not possible to predict automatically whether a router will forward a multicast packet, since this depends on your network configuration.

Therefore, there are three options to control how Solaris Bandwidth Manager handles multicast traffic. Choose the most appropriate option for your network:

• Send through the ipqos module any traffic that might be forwarded by the router. This makes sure that traffic that is forwarded has bandwidth allocated. Send traffic that will not be forwarded by the router directly to the router, not through the ipqos module.

  The router needs to be aware of all multicast traffic, even traffic that it does not forward. The router does not forward traffic with a time-to-live of less than 2, or that is intended for the local subnet only (that is, traffic with a destination address in the range 224.0.0.0 to 224.0.0.255).

• Send all multicast traffic directly to the router, not through the ipqos module. Do this only if you know that the router will never forward any multicast traffic.

• Drop multicast packets and do not send them to the router. This means that the router never receives any multicast traffic.