One of my friends asked me recently if he had too much redundancy. He was concerned about potential issues in having multiple equal cost paths from his Unified Communications Manager to his IP phones, and between IP phones in different locations. (In his case, he is running EIGRP and has up to 4 equal cost paths.)
I told him that his VoIP traffic should be fine with the Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF) enabled on his Layer 3 switches. By default, his switches use CEF’s per-destination load balancing across his multiple parallel paths. CEF tracks paths based on both the source and destination address of the two devices on the ends of the path. Each one-way path between two IP nodes is an IP session, and each session is logically identified as a unique source-destination address pair. Therefore, the session from a remote VoIP phone to the Unified Call Manager would always follow one unidirectional path, and the path from one VoIP phone to a remote VoIP phone would always follow one unidirectional path. This preserves packet ordering for packets within a flow by ensuring that all packets within a single IP source/destination flow are sent on the same route.
With CEF load balancing, the session-to-path assignment is done using a hash function that considers the source and destination IP addresses and, in recent releases of Cisco IOS, a unique hash ID that randomizes the assignment across the end-to-end path. For all sessions being forwarded, each active path carries a share of the number of sessions.
Note: Because per-destination CEF load balancing depends on the statistical distribution of traffic, the load sharing across the links becomes more effective as the number of source-destination pairs increase.
Enabling CEF with Infrastructure Enhancements
I then started wondering about whether there were quirks for enabling CEF by platform. (I sort of remembered some issues in the past.) However, after looking up CEF features, I found that most IOS releases now support CEF infrastructure enhancements. In addition, IPv4 fast switching has been removed from the IOS. For these and later Cisco IOS releases as shown in the table below, the switching path options are Cisco Express Forwarding switched or process switched. As best I can tell, CEF is enabled by default on all these platforms, and can be re-enabled with the ip cef orthe ip cef distributed global configuration.
| Cisco IOS Release | Platforms Supported |
| 12.2(25)SE (use global command ip cef [distributed] to re-enable if needed) |
Catalyst 2970 series switches Catalyst ME 3400 Catalyst 3500 series switches Catalyst 3750 series switches |
| 12.2(25)SG (use global command ip cef [distributed] to re-enable if needed) |
Catalyst 4500 series switches Catalyst 4900 series switches |
| 12.2(28)SB | Cisco 7200 series routers Cisco 7301 series routers Cisco 7304 series routers Cisco 10000 series routers |
| 12.2(33)SRA (use global command ip cef [distributed] to re-enable if needed) |
Cisco 7600 series routers |
| 12.2(33)SXH (use global command ip cef to re-enable if needed) |
Catalyst 6500 series switches |
| 12.4(20)T (use global command ip cef to re-enable if needed) |
Cisco 800 series routers Cisco 1700 series routers Cisco 1800 series routers Cisco 2600 series routers Cisco 2800 series routers Cisco 3200 series routers Cisco 3600 series routers Cisco 3700 series routers Cisco 3800 series routers Cisco 7200 series routers Cisco 7400 series routers Cisco 8850 series routers Cisco AS5000 series universal gateways |
| 15.0 (use global command ip cef to re-enable if needed) |
Cisco 1900 series routers Cisco 2900 series routers Cisco 3900 series routers |
Commands to Use to Check CEF Status:
- To verify the CEF is running on the device, use the show ip cef command.
- To verify the state of CEF on the device, use the show cef state command.
- To verify the CEF configuration of an interface, use the show cef interface type number command.
- To verify that the routing table includes all the parallel paths, use the show ip route network command.
- To determine which path a session between a source and destination address is assigned, use the show ip cef exact-route source-ip-address destination-ip-address command.
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More on Cisco Express Forwarding
Some useful resources on CEF include:
- Troubleshooting Load Balancing Over Parallel Links Using Cisco Express Forwarding at
http://www.ciscosystems.org.ro/en/US/tech/tk827/tk831/technologies_tech_note09186a0080094806.shtml - Cisco Express Forwarding Enhancements: Removal of IP Fast Switching and Introduction of CLI Changes
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/ipswitch/configuration/guide/cef_port_to_t_train_ps6441_TSD_Products_
Configuration_Guide_Chapter.html#wp1055265 - Cisco Express Forwarding Features Roadmap
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/ipswitch/configuration/guide/cef_feature_roadmap_ps6350_TSD_Products_
Configuration_Guide_Chapter.html
excellent summary, this information cleared my questions.
Thank you so much Carole warner reece 🙂
Nothing is said about dissimilar latency parallel paths, Does CEF takes this into account?