Port mirroing causes packet duplication

[fkacmaz]

During ERS 8600 upgrade from 3.7.16.1 to 5.1.6 release, I've encountered that packets were being duplicated for the two devices (lets say X and Y) that I have in my network.
In the beginning, it seemed like happenning intermitently.
Currently, I have a pattern to replicate the issue.

I’ve done the below tests in my lab:

Rebooting the switch or port-resetting is not necessary to reproduce the problem
If I disable port mirroring for only X, then duplication happens for only Y
If I disable port mirroring for only Y, then duplication happens for only X
If I disable port mirroring for any of the ports between 1/1 and 1/8 including, then duplication happens for both X and Y
If I disable port mirroring for the ports except for 1/1-1/8, then no duplicated messages have been encountered

For a 8632TXE card, ports are grouped in 8 and every 8 ports belong to one OctaPID.
The ingress OctaPID replicates each cell and sends the copy to the switch fabric for delivery to the mirror port.
In our case, seems like packets are being “tripled”, one of them is sent to Mirroring (destination) port and other two are sent to actual destination. Port mirroring is very useful but it still relies on accurate replication of packets.

Can you please advise whether or not you have encountered a similar situation before?

[Michael McNamara]

Perhaps someone else can test your specific scenario but the issue here is that E cards are not officially supported (and probably never fully tested) with 5.x software.

Have you tried to replicate the problem on a R or RS module?

Cheers!

[fkacmaz]

Michael,

I haven't tried it because I don't have any R/RS module.
I've already created a ticket to Avaya to understand whether or not any limitation that I don't know regarding the port-mirroring with E-modules. Besides, I was thinking the problem might be related to 5.1.6 load because it happened after I upgraded the 8600 unit to 5.1.6 from 3.7.16.1.

What I need to understand is that whether enabling/disabling port-mirroing for the ports that belong to the same OctaPID effects the traffic on the other port or not.

Cheers!