Quick question about flooding frames

Ws6

Hi everyone,

I came across a chapter review question in the odoms book that has me confused. So do switches flood unknown unicast frames to all ports in the same vlan, even if the switch knows some of the mac addresses associated with those ports?

Thanks for your time

davenull

Yes, you have to consider the possibility that there could be multiple devices connected to that port (with a hub, for example), and the switch just hasn't learned all of their MAC addresses yet.

joelsfood

What Dave said. Also, becomes even more relevant these days with virtualization, as you can have hundreds of mac addresses on a single port, or a VM vmotion between hosts and change ports without any downtime.

Ws6

thank you both for the response