Think of your network as a river of data. You have a steady current of data moving smoothly down the channel. All your network users are like tiny tributaries branching off the main river taking only as much water (bandwidth) as they need to process data. When you start to multicast voice, video, data, and audio over the LAN, those streams suddenly become the size of the main river. The result is that each user is basically flooded with data and it becomes almost if not impossible to do any other tasks. This scenario of sending transmission to every user on the network is called broadcasting, and it slows the network down to a trickle. But there are network protocol methods that alleviate this problem.
Unicasting vs. multicasting
Unicasting is sending data point-to-point, from one network device to another. Multicasting is transmitting data from one network device to multiple users.
When multicasting with Layer 2 switches, all attached network devices receive the network packets, whether they want them or not. When you multicast with Layer 3 switches (with multicast support), you send the network packets to only the exact client/receives who want them. You control where the river of data goes and put up locks to keep the river out of other user streams.
Filed under: ProAV | Tagged: KVM, LAN, Multicasting, Unicasting, Video | 1 Comment »