Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF) is an advanced layer 3 switching technology used mainly in large core networks to enchance the network performance.

cef

Let’s see how we can configure Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF) on cisco devices :

SWITCH_A(conf)#ip cef (CEF is already active on default config)
SWITCH_A#show ip cef vlan 200


In some cases we can’t use Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF) :

1- IP headers that have options ( For security reasons )

2- For packets which has no TTL

3- Packets target to tunnel interface

4- Unsupported encapsulations

5- Packets requires fragmantation

*** CEF informations are kept in FIB ( Forwarding information base )