CiscoNX-OSIOSNetflowComparison.docVIP

Objective This tech note outlines the main differences in NetFlow between Cisco? NX-OS Software and Cisco IOS? Software. Sample configurations are included for Cisco NX-OS and Cisco IOS Software for some common features to demonstrate the similarities and differences. Please refer to the NX-OS documentation on C for a complete list of supported features. Netflow Overview NetFlow provides flow-based statistics collection that is useful for troubleshooting, traffic analysis, performance monitoring, and security threat prevention. Cisco NX-OS supports a flexible architecture that allows a user to collect different data for different applications per interface, whereas the Cisco IOS Software supports one flow mask and export pair for the entire chassis. Important Cisco NX-OS and Cisco IOS Software Differences In Cisco NX-OS: NetFlow command-line interface (CLI) configuration and verification commands are not available until you enable the NetFlow feature with the feature netflow command. Two flow modes are supported: full and sampled. Sampled mode supports packet-based sampling (1-64 out of 1-8192). In sampled mode, the sampling occurs before the NetFlow cache is populated. Each line-card module supports 512,000 NetFlow cache entries. Layer 2 NetFlow based on MAC addresses is not supported at this time. A flexible architecture is used that consist of flow records, flow exports, and flow monitors. Cisco NX-OS supports more key and non-key fields for creating flow records and can collect additional information such as TCP flags and system uptime. NetFlow Versions 5 and 9 Export features are supported (Version 9 is recommended). A source interface must be configured for each flow export. Cisco NX-OS defaults to User Datagram Protocol (UDP) port 9995 for NetFlow Data Export. Cisco NX-OS provides more granular aging timers (session timer and aggressive threshold). The default aging timer values are different than in Cisco IOS Software. The NetFlow featur