Cisco Switch : Storm Control

Storm Control can shut down an interface that is causing a Unicast, Multicast or Broadcast Storm. It works with Rising and Falling Thresholds. If a specific type of traffic hits the rising Threshold it will block that type of traffic until the number of packets it see’s is below the set falling threshold. This can be in Percentage, Bits Per Second or Packets Per Second

Here is how to enable its various options:

tpw-sw1(conf)# int gi0/1
tpw-sw1(config-int)# storm-control broadcast level 10 5 - this command means if I see more than 10% broadcast traffic I will block until I see it fall under 5%
tpw-sw1(conf)# int gi0/1
tpw-sw1(config-int)# storm-control multicast level bps 20m 10m - this command means if I see more than 20Mbps multicast traffic I will block until I see it fall under 10Mbps
tpw-sw1(conf)# int gi0/1
tpw-sw1(config-int)# storm-control unicast level pps 50k  - this command means if I see more than 50,000 unicast packets per second, I will drop traffic until I see it fall below 50,000 packers per second, that is what happens if you do not put a falling threshold. Both rising and falling threshold is 50,000
tpw-sw1(conf)# int gi0/1
tpw-sw1(config-int)# storm-control action shutdown

Check and Verify

tpw-sw1(conf)# show storm-control broadcast

tpw-sw1(conf)# show storm-control multicast

tpw-sw1(conf)# show storm-control unicast

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