Load Balancing in CEF

CEF allows for load balancing or load sharing of traffic among multiple outgoing links. CEF needs multiple outgoing links as next hops in the routing table to perform load balancing. The command maximum-paths specifies how many paths or next hops are allowed per prefix in the routing table for the specific routing protocol. For instance, if you configure maximum-path 2 under the routing protocol Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), only two OSPF paths per prefix are allowed in the routing table. Those two paths are then shown in the CEF table as outgoing paths.

In CEF, the two main load balancing schemes are per-packet or per-destination. If you configure the per-packet load balancing scheme, the load balancing of all packets ...

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