Best practice for Traffic Shaping Device Selection

[AmirHosseinKamrani]

Hi

I'm curious to know what you think is the best device for shaping traffic, especially when dealing with high volumes like 100G. Would a router be the top choice, or do switches handle this well too?

I know that cisco 4500X and Cisco 6816 switches can handle about 80G traffic . Im looking for higher traffic 

[balaji.bandi]

Now a days most of te recent hardware is decent high capcity compute which can handle high throughput

like Cat 9K switches and Routers 8K

Question here why do you want to shape, what is the use cases here. when you looking high throughput links personally avoide QoS since you have good amount bandwidth to process.

[AmirHosseinKamrani]

It depends on the administrator network policy
Although the total BW is about 100G but this throughput is sum of many customers that they need their specific BW and we need to shape them accordingly
So we need device to process that condition
And some of switches can handle but shape is not handled mainly by switches

[balaji.bandi]

As per 9K and other models' that works as expected -  until any specific code not working, that could be bug or limitations.

[Joseph W. Doherty]

How many concurrent shapers?

Has to be shapers, not policets?

What attribute(s) would you match on?

BTW, you're correct, many switches don't support shaping well or at all.  Finding suitable devices might be difficult due to 100g requirement.  (High throughput needs hardware support which is often weak in QoS support.)

[AmirHosseinKamrani]

thanks joseph

this is sample config : 

policy-map Temp

class class-default
police cir 250000000

interface Vlan2035

service-policy output Temp

and we have about 500 Customers that we want to shape them .

[Joseph W. Doherty]

In your reply, you're policing, not shaping.  Is that what you want?

500 customers on a SVI?  If so, how would you tell them apart?

[AmirHosseinKamrani]

Thanks Joseph for your reply 

as  told before, only we want to police 500 Customer on their own VLAN (like config before)

Each customer is separated by VLAN.

Best regards 

[Joseph W. Doherty]

One customer per VLAN, with one policy just using a single policer, is more likely to be supported.

For any 100g switch or router, check if datasheet notes any limit for total policers supported.

[balaji.bandi]

I have attached some sample config you can find Parent Child allocation if you looking policy.

worth looking - Per-port, per-VLAN policy

[GhufranPervaiz2]

For shaping traffic at high volumes like 100G, routers typically offer more advanced capabilities and higher throughput compared to switches. This is because routers are specifically designed for handling network traffic between different networks, while switches are primarily intended for connecting devices within a single network.

Routers generally provide more granular control over traffic shaping policies, allowing you to define specific rules for different types of traffic, such as prioritizing certain applications or limiting bandwidth usage for others. They also often support more sophisticated queuing mechanisms to manage congestion and ensure consistent performance.

Consider routers from the Cisco ASR 9000 or Cisco NCS 5000 series for comprehensive traffic shaping features.

[Joseph W. Doherty]

". . . routers typically offer more advanced capabilities . . ."

Agreed.

". . . and higher throughput compared to switches."

For the "low" end L3 switches, they generally have much higher throughput then "low" end routers.  On the "high" end, "routers" often drop some features because they often use L3 specially hardware (much as L3 switches do).  Also at the "high" end, "switches" usually don't exist.

Years ago, I use to like to use, as an example, Cisco's Catalyst 6500 L3 switch vs. Cisco's 7600 "router".  Both chassis might use the same exact supervisors, the same exact line cards and even (for a while) ran the same exact IOS.  So how different, really, was the 6500 "switch" vs. the 7600 "router"?

". . . while switches are primarily intended for connecting devices within a single network."

Agree for a L2 switch, but for a L3 switch?