Mirroring Overview
The mirroring feature allows the network administrator to replicate all traffic arriving and/or leaving the selected system interfaces. This data can be used for collection or analysis.
The traffic replicated using the mirroring feature can be sent to a separate interface on the same switch as the traffic source for analysis or inspection. Such a collection of interfaces and settings is called a mirror session.
A mirror session can be configured with many traffic sources but only a single output, or destination. In the initial configuration, the mirror session is disabled. The administrator has to enable the feature to start the replication.
Care must be taken in choosing the number and rates of sources to avoid over-saturating a session destination. A mirror session with multiple 10G sources can overwhelm a single 10G destination and important data may be lost.