I have seen a lot of people ask the question how can they easily generate multicast traffic on their Cisco home lab when studying for the BSCI. One way I’ve seen is to stream videos across your network. This is fine, but there is a much easier way.

Nortel has a tool called Multicast Hammer (aka MCHammer). It’s a simple multicast client and multicast server that will allow you to see the multicast traffic as it’s being sent over your network. It takes all the guess work out of multicast generation. Another really cool benefit is it’s easy to generate multiple clients if you have the PC’s or Virtual Machines available.

You can find Multicast Hammer on Nortel’s website. Warning, you will have to provide your Name and email address, but it doesn’t look like a login is actually required to download it.