@Christoffer wrote:
Thanks Colin, would that also work for traffic initiated by the clients on the branch? Seems like they are prioritizing traffic from a central server outbound to the client in that article.
Christoffer,
QOS is only good if you can provide it end to end. Any point of congestion would need to be managed everywhere.
- Identify where congestion actually is
- Feed enough information to an intelligent devices to manage that congestion to prioritize that application.
If you are using a web application and you are just sending clicks, the congestion will be in the opposite direction, delivering the web page to the client. The web page content is what could be competing with YouTube traffic to the client. If you have congestion on your WAN link and your Wan link itself cannot deliver your web app traffic at a higher priority than youtube traffic, there is nothing that can be done. There also could be congestion on the Wifi link delivering traffic to the client.
The article that I mentioned above will mark traffic when it comes into the controller so that if your infrastructure is configured correctly, it can "see" the markings and prioritize it on the WAN. The same ACL will also put it into the proper WMM queue and marking so that when we attempt to deliver it to the client from the access point, it will have the correct priority over the air.
Unless it is a specialized application that runs on the iPad that marks WMM from the client to the access point, it cannot be prioritized over the air from the client to the access point. In many situations, it is that wifi link that is the biggest cause of congestion. In your current situation, if a client is clicking on web pages, very little content goes from the client to the server, so that should not be your issue. If you are concerned, again, you can employ decrypt tunnel, so that the AP can mark traffic going to that server, but your network devices between the access point and the controller, like your switches, WAN router and other devices would need to be configured to prioritize via the markings that would be set by the access point.
The other alternative is if you have an Aruba Controller running 6.4 and AppRF so that you can throttle Youtube or specific traffic so that it only consumes a limited amount of bandwidth. http://community.arubanetworks.com/t5/Controller-Based-WLANs/What-is-AppRF/ta-p/176528
Again, you need to model your use case to understand where your congestion could really be so that you are only configure what you need to deliver application reliability; you could prioritize one application and hurt others. QOS might not help if you have a small pipe in the first place..