Method and apparatus for mirroring traffic over a network

摘要

A method and apparatus for mirroring traffic from a first network device to a second network device are disclosed. The method includes the selecting of one or more ingress frames from an ingress stream using mirror classification criteria; duplicating the one or more ingress frames; appending a mirrored flow encapsulation header with a virtual local area network tag; transmitting the duplicate frames with tags from the first network device to the second network device; and removing the mirrored flow encapsulation header at the target network device to regenerate the ingress frames originally received at the first network device. The ingress frames may then be forwarded to an egress port of the second network device and analyzed by a traffic analysis tool, for example. With the invention, the traffic received at the first network device may be analyzed remotely.