Use multicast snooping on a vSphere Distributed Switch to forward traffic in a precise manner according to Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) or Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) membership information that virtual machines send to subscribe for multicast traffic.

Use multicast snooping if virtualized workloads on the switch subscribe to more than 32 multicast groups or must receive traffic from specific source nodes. For information about the multicast filtering modes of vSphere Distributed Switch, see Multicast Filtering Modes.

Prerequisites

Verify that vSphere Distributed Switch is version 6.0.0 and later.

Procedure

  1. On the vSphere Client Home page, click Networking and navigate to the distributed switch.
  2. From the Actions menu, select Settings > Edit Settings.
  3. In the dialog box that displays the settings of the switch, click Advanced.
  4. From the Multicast filtering mode drop-down menu, select IGMP/MLD snooping, and click OK.

Results

Multicast snooping becomes active on hosts running ESXi 6.0 and later.