Multicasting within a distributed control plane of a switch

A non-transitory processor-readable medium storing code representing instructions that when executed cause a processor to:

• receive a first signal including a data packet, the data packet being associated with a multicast group;
• receive a second signal indicating a plurality of virtual local area networks (VLANs), each VLAN from the plurality of VLANs being associated with at least one peripheral processing device from a plurality of peripheral processing devices included in the multicast group;
• and
• send, to a replication engine associated with a first VLAN from the plurality of VLANs, a third signal such that the replication engine sends, to a first peripheral processing device from the plurality of peripheral processing devices, a fourth signal including a copy of the data packet, the first peripheral processing device being a member of the first VLAN from the plurality of VLANs.

An apparatus, comprising:

• a multicast group management module configured to be instantiated at a compute device operatively coupled to a layer-2 device and a switch fabric, the layer-2 device to be associated with a virtual local area network (VLAN),
• the multicast group management module to receive, from the layer-2 device, a first signal, the first signal being based at least in part on a request to join a multicast group including a plurality of peripheral processing devices, the request being sent by a peripheral processing device associated with the VLAN,
• the multicast group management module to define, based on the first signal, an association between the VLAN and the multicast group,
• the multicast group management module to send, to a layer-3 device, a second signal indicating the association between the VLAN and the multicast group.