Supported IP Discovery Mechanisms in KVM-Environments

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In KVM environments, there are two IP discovery mechanisms supported: Packet Snooping and ARP Snooping.

1. Packet Snooping: This mechanism involves capturing all IP packets and looking for ARP requests and responses. Once an ARP request is detected, the source and destination MAC addresses are recorded along with the corresponding IP addresses. This information is then used to create a mapping between IP and MAC addresses. Packet snooping can be resource-intensive since it requires capturing and analyzing all IP packets, but it is highly accurate and can detect IP changes in real-time.

2. ARP Snooping: ARP snooping is a mechanism that enables a switch to keep a table of IP addresses and their corresponding MAC addresses. The switch listens to ARP broadcasts and learns which IP addresses are associated with which MAC addresses. ARP snooping can prevent certain types of attacks, such as ARP spoofing, by detecting and dropping ARP packets that have incorrect MAC addresses. ARP snooping is an efficient and low-resource method of IP discovery, as it only monitors ARP traffic on the network.

IGMP Snooping, DHCP Snooping, and ND Snooping are not supported in KVM environments. IGMP snooping is a mechanism used to manage multicast traffic, and DHCP snooping is a security feature that validates DHCP messages and drops unauthorized ones. ND snooping is a similar mechanism to ARP snooping but is used in IPv6 networks to map IPv6 addresses to MAC addresses.