A game studio ACI bridge domain is set to hardware proxy. A leaf receives a unicast frame for a MAC that no leaf has learned. What does the fabric do with that frame?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Hardware proxy is a receptionist with a directory, not a shout down the hall. You send the unknown unicast toward the spine COOP lookup instead of flooding it. If the studio wanted flooding, the bridge domain would be set that way.
Full Explanation
In hardware-proxy mode, a leaf that does not know a destination MAC consults the spine Council of Oracles Protocol database, which is built from endpoint learns across the fabric. The frame is not flooded to every port in the bridge domain. That lookup is the behavior the game studio configured. Flooding unknown unicast is the other bridge-domain choice. It is not what hardware proxy does. The spine does not rewrite a unicast frame into a broadcast. Broadcast and unknown unicast are different, and a bridge domain can flood broadcast while still proxying unknown unicast. The APIC is the controller. It does not generate an ARP request to complete a data-plane frame for a silent host. Caveat: if no leaf has ever learned the MAC, COOP has no entry to hand back, and the traffic still fails until the silent host speaks or you use a feature meant for silent hosts. Operational check: confirm the bridge domain forwarding mode is hardware proxy, then generate traffic to an unknown MAC and verify the leaf does not flood it on the endpoint ports.