Cisco Intelligent Traffic Director (Routed Firewall Mode Only)
When using Individual interfaces, each Firewall Threat Defense interface maintains its own IP address and MAC address. Intelligent Traffic Director (ITD) is a high-speed hardware load-balancing solution for Nexus 5000, 6000, 7000, and 9000 switch series. In addition to fully covering the functional capabilities of traditional PBR, it offers a simplified configuration workflow and multiple additional features for a more granular load distribution.
ITD supports IP stickiness, consistent hashing for bi-directional flow symmetry, virtual IP addressing, health monitoring, sophisticated failure handling policies with N+M redundancy, weighted load-balancing, and application IP SLA probes including DNS. Due to the dynamic nature of load-balancing, it achieves a more even traffic distribution across all cluster nodes as compared to PBR. In order to achieve bi-directional flow symmetry, we recommend configuring ITD such that forward and return packets of a connection are directed to the same Firewall Threat Defense. See the following URL for more details: