Category: CEF

According to the Cisco IOS documentation, you can select between the original and the universal CEF load sharing algorithm with the ip cef load-sharing algorithm name parameter global configuration command (we'll leave the tunnel algorithm aside for the moment). Of course, they don't tell you what you select.

The original algorithm used only the source and destination IP addresses to get the 4-bit hash entry (see the CEF Load Sharing Details for more information), which could result in suboptimal network utilization in some border cases (if anyone wants to know why, leave me a comment). The universal algorithm adds a router-specific value to the hash function, ensuring that the same source-destination pair will hash into a different 4-bit value on different boxes. If you really want to fine-tune the hash function, you can even specify the value to be added with the last option of the ip cef load-sharing algorithm command.

I had to investigate the details of CEF load sharing for one of my upcoming article and found (yet again) that the details are rather undocumented in official documentation. So, this is how it works (in case you ever need to know):

• For every CEF entry (IP route) where there are multiple paths to the destination, the router creates a 16-row hash table, populating the entries with pointers to individual paths. The hash table can be inspected with the show ip cef prefix internal command.
• The load balancing ratio is approxiated by number of entries in the hash table belonging to each path. If you have unequal-cost load balancing (EIGRP based on composite metrics and MPLS TE tunnels based on requested bandwidth), individual paths will be associated with different number of rows.
• If you configure per-destination load balancing, the source and destination IP address in the incoming IP packet are hashed into a 4-bit value that selects the outgoing path in the CEF has table.