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QoS for VOIP

tinhnho123
Level 2
Level 2

Hi Guys,

I have a small office where we have a firewall and 2 switches (cisco 3750 and 2960). I have 4 Voip phones and the calls have been dropped for sometimes during busy day.

I have a lease circuit which has 60Mbps connection. we have VPN ipsec tunnel setup between the office and head quarter (attachment), all traffic is routed back to head quarter.

I’d like to reserve 30Mbps out of 60Mbps for Voip and video traffic and the rest for other traffics. how do setup this up with QoS on the switches?
Thanks.

6 Replies 6

Joseph W. Doherty
Hall of Fame
Hall of Fame

What about traffic from HQ to branch?

What's creating the VPN tunnel (the FWs)?

The "leased" circuit is Internet?  If so, do you also allow non VPN traffic on either side's VPN interfaces?  What kind of hand-offs?

What's the connection between the FW and the 3750?  Ethernet?  If so, bandwidth?

FYI: normally, for QoS, you need to concern yourself with both directions of traffic.  The 3750 is a weak QoS platform, as it's a LAN switch.  If FW is hosting VPN tunnel, we cannot really know bandwidth available to 3750 because the VPN overhead will vary per packet, although we might physically loop FW back through 3750 to address this problem.

The traffic from HQ to branch is 60Mbps as well.

We use Cisco ASA for VPN site to site.

Yes, the leased circuit is the internet. Everything goes thru the tunnel to HQ and get out to internet from HQ's firewall. 

The connection between firewall and 3750 is 1Gbps ethernet. 

I've almost no experience with ASA; don't recall if they have any QoS features, especially, in this case, support for a shaper.  Without that, as mentioned in my first post, we might be able to connect ASA's "outside" interface to 3750 (or 2960) and then connect 3750 (or 2960) to Internet.  This because the 3750 (or 2960) can shape (sort of), and provides 4 queues where we can prioritize traffic like VoIP.  (This also assumes, we might ToS tag traffic going into ASA, from LAN, and ASA would duplicate ToS tag on the VPN traffic.  If it doesn't, we just "shape" on traffic to ASA, but at a rate slow enough such that it likely would be under the 60 Mbps limit, even with VPN overhead.)

Again, for effective QoS, you need to consider both directions of traffic.  I.e. to guarantee VoIP performance, not only would you configure QoS at branch, but at HQ.  So, I need to know all (actually only that deals with Internet) the details of the HQ topology too.  (BTW, still insufficient information on branch too.)

Anytime you mix "raw" Internet and VPN (across) Internet, on the same link, you've effectively make QoS useless unless your ISP is willing to support QoS on their port (almost all won't), from the Internet, to your device.  Why?  Because otherwise you have no control over traffic coming from Internet to your site, and ergo, cannot insure something like VoIP gets the QoS treatment it needs.

If you cannot obtain QoS from your ISP(s), the alternative is obtain another Internet link, for just your VPN traffic, or at least the "critical" VPN traffic.  With a dedicated link, we can often exactly manage bandwidth and then provide effective QoS.

BTW, QoS support is much better on Cisco routers.  You might consider obtaining a "small" (i.e. one capable of handling 60+ Mbps, duplex) Cisco ISR.

Also BTW, in your OP, you mention "video traffic", what kind?  I.e. real-time (e.g. video conferencing) or not real-time (video streaming) (both?).

Leo Laohoo
Hall of Fame
Hall of Fame

I agree with @Joseph W. Doherty, QoS past the internet is of no use because ISP do not "respect" QoS from the customer. 

Trace each interface, from the internet all the way to the switches, and see if there are any Total Output Drops.  

Is QoS enabled inside the network?

Hi,

 

The inside network of the branch which does not have qos enable yet.

". . . QoS past the internet is of no use because ISP do not "respect" QoS from the customer."

ISPs, as Leo notes, generally don't support QoS.  However, QoS, to the Internet, can be very, very useful, if you're sending to another site of yours where you manage all the bandwidth between those sites.  In such cases, I've found sending traffic across the Internet can often obtain service levels like you can obtain using a dedicated "private" WAN bandwidth.  This because, most ISPs work hard to avoid congestion within the Internet except at the egress point to your network.

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