Reference Guide

ERPM Behavior on a typical Dell Networking OS
The Dell Networking OS is designed to support only the Encapsulation of the data received / transmitted
at the specified source port (Port A). An ERPM destination session / decapsulation of the ERPM packets at
the destination Switch are not supported.
As seen in the above figure, the packets received/transmitted on Port A will be encapsulated with an
IP/GRE header plus a new L2 header and sent to the destination ip address (Port D’s ip address) on the
sniffer. The Header that gets attached to the packet is 38 bytes long.
If the sniffer does not support IP interface, a destination switch will be needed to receive the
encapsulated ERPM packet and locally mirror the whole packet to the Sniffer or a Linux Server.
Decapsulation of ERPM packets at the Destination IP/ Analyzer
• In order to achieve the decapsulation of the original payload from the ERPM header. The below two
methods are suggested :
a. Using Network Analyzer
– Install any well-known Network Packet Analyzer tool which is open source and free to
download.
– Start capture of ERPM packets on the Sniffer and save it to the trace file (for example :
erpmwithheader.pcap).
– The Header that gets attached to the packet is 38 bytes long. In case of a packet with L3
VLAN, it would be 42 bytes long. The original payload /original mirrored data starts from the
Port Monitoring
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