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WAN Network Validation

mnlatif
Level 3
Level 3

Hi,

We are in the process of validating our WAN network. As per the SLA the network is supposed to provide upto 3Mb\s of guaranteed BW.

Using Iperf as our tool for testing, we have seen the speeds upto 2.8Mb\s, which is pretty reasonable. However we need to justify that why getting upto within 90% of the available BW is an Ok result.

Since this is a MPLS network, so addition of MPLS headers by the Edge router can be one factor.

Any Line Errors might also have an effect.

Can there be any other factors ?

Any personal experiences regarding the Network Speed Validation over a WAN link ? What % of the advertised Bandwidth is usually acceptable.

This is an Inter-Continental link.

Thanks \\ Naman

2 Replies 2

smahbub
Level 6
Level 6

I guess it should be 100% , ru facing ant packet dropping or buffer overflow. If the link doesn't have nay errors it should be 100%

I haven't used IPerf enough to know the gritty details of the calculations and how accurate they are. You may want to also try Qcheck and see of you get different results. Also, I use ftp of a large binary file as a rough estimate as well, typically writing the file to null to minimize the impact of storage I/O.

Keep in mind that IP stack tuning, such as tcp window sizes, SACK, MTU, etc. all play a factor in throughput, as well as NICS and CPU's on your hosts, etc. Usually when I'm validating a network I use a number of hosts running IPerf, Qcheck, ftp, etc. to minimize the influence of these factors.

Check with your provider and see if they have any ideas and what tools they use to validate offered SLA's.

BTW, what does your latency look like at at 0 and at 2.8Mb/s? If they aren't providing the throughput guaranteed, maybe the response time / latency is off as well.

Gary

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