Traffic Shaping

[pschwalger]

We have 2 datacenters and 3 remote offices connected using BGP through our Telco's MPLS network.

All sites are ethernet connected but bandwidth access is limited to 5Mb at each site, except Datacenter A which has 10Mb.

This allows Datacenter A to transmit at up to 5MB to a remote office as well as simultaneously transmitting 5Mb to Datacenter B.

The only problem is that any data transfers from Datacenter A to any single remote site will cause traffic to be discarded at a level above 5mbps.

Occassional data transfers from Datacenter A to Datacenter B have been an issue and some clients connected via Datacenter B have experienced some poor responses when they connect to applications at Datacenter A when a transfer is occurring.

Would applying traffic shaping to Datacenter A's router be helpful. I dont want to upgrade Datacenter B to 10Mb & dont really want to downgrade Datacenter A to 5Mb.

I haven't done any traffic shaping previously but have been doing a bit of reading and would like to do some traffic shaping possibly based on traffic type and/or source / destination.

Can anyone offer any advise and help with a sample config. Im a bit confused whether I would use Class-Based or DTS.

Thanks...Peter.

[mark.edwards]

Hi, Class Based Shaping (GTS) would be a good solution here. You could also setup an additional policy-map to queue your shaped traffic (the second policy map should be nested under the main shaping policy). An example of the config could look something like the below;

class-map match-all telnet

match protocol telnet

class-map match-all FTP

match protocol ftp

class-map match-all web

match protocol http

!

!

policy-map QoS-queue

class FTP

bandwidth percent 20

class web

bandwidth percent 20

class telnet

bandwidth percent 10

policy-map SHAPE

class class-default

shape average 5000000

service-policy QoS-queue

interface Ethernet0/0

ip address 10.10.10.1 255.255.255.0

service-policy output SHAPE

[2cellefsen]

Hi!

If you have traffic between your remote offices (full mesh IP VPN) you might have a challenge, since you can shape outgoing traffic, but have no control on the aggregated incoming traffic to one datacenter or remote office.

How well it works depends on how your protocols and applications handle delay and loss. Voice traffic would suffer...

Since your SP use ethernet they might only shape your outgoing traffic at the PE, and you are home free. Talk to your SP to find out.

Otherwise the mentioned generic shaper underneath might work depending on your hardware and IOS.

Best regards

- Oyvind