Comware

I have a 300MB TimeWarner  Ethernet circuit between my Home Office and Colo and wanted to know if I could assign bandwidth/QOS based on VLANS.  For Example, VLAN 200 will be dedicated to Storage traffic, VLAN300 will be dedicated to Database traffic and so on.  I don't want one type of traffic dominated the whole circuit and wante to assign specifc bandwdith to each type of traffic.

 

At home office, I have HP 5400zl switch, and at the colo we purchased an HP A-5830 switch.

 

Please advise if the above possible or alternate solution.

 

Regards,

 

Hi aali,

 

Whether you can do this is dependent upon whether your Time Warner circuit passes VLAN tags through without interference.  This is normally called Q-in-Q.  You should ask them whether that's something the circuit can do, but the easiest method is just to test it.  Tag a test VLAN on both ends of the link, assign some IP addresses, and see if you can ping.

 

If your link doesn't provide Q-in-Q, your simplest option is probably to use a routed connection and configure different subnets on each end of the link.

Hi Paul,

 

Thank you for your response.  Yes, the TW will be able to pass VLAN tagging between the sites, but I will also test it.

 

Now, what be the easiest method to assign bandwidth per VLAN as I stated in my original thread.

 

Regards,

 

 

Hi aali,

I'll leave the bandwidth capping features to those more qualified than me. If i remember correctly, 5400s don't have that feature, so you might have to do it only on the 5820 end. But it's been a while since i've touched 5400s, so don't take my word for it.

I still play with 5400s, but I haven't played with "Guaranteed Minimum Bandwidth", which is probably the feature you want.

 

FIrst, check how many queues you have configured in QoS ("show qos queue-config"). Hopefully you haven't fiddled with this and it is set to its default correspondences.

 

Then, you assign a bandwidth % for each queue on your outbound "edge" port, eg

int a1-a5 bandwidth-min output 2 3 30 10 10 10 15 20

or

int a1-a5 bandwidth-min output 2 3 30 10 10 10 15 strict

 

(Queues in order from 1 to 8. "strict" means 8 gets everything it needs. Otherwise if set to "20", 8 gets 20%, plus it gets to use whatever it needs from whatever is unused in all the other queues. Then 7 gets its chance, etc... If your %s don't all add up to 100, then whatever is left over is just unused and available for use by any oversubscribed queues, highest-priority queue getting first choice).

 

The traffic is assigned a queue according to the 802.1p frame tags.

 

(HP seem to love using 6 for voice, but normally 802.1p says 5 should be used for voice, I think they've confused TOS 5 with queue 6, or I just haven't understood them properly).

 

Just looking in the manual, they seem to explain this correctly:

 

Table 20 Per-port outbound priority queues
802.1p Priority settings in tagged VLAN packets1 Outbound priority queue for a given port
1 (low)                                                                                      1
2 (low)                                                                                      2
0 (normal)                                                                               3
3 (normal)                                                                               4
4 (medium)                                                                             5
5 (medium)                                                                             6
6 (high)                                                                                     7
7 (high)                                                                                     8
 

This is correct, because you shouldn't be using TOS 6 (which is 110) or 7 (111).

 

But elsewhere, I swear I see them trying to get you to use TOS 6 for voice instead of 5 (correct value of 101).

    

Mind you, all that can be moot anyway if your upstream provider haven't got their network configured properly: I have a WAN link where a TOS of 4 is prioritised (good, normally used for video), 0 is given default priority, but a TOS of 5 experiences 50% packet loss. And apparently this large, multinational telecom company doesn't understand what they are doing wrong when I tried explaining it to them. Twice. Their guys in suits didn't believe me that they would be doing this, and their guys in jeans didn't see the problem.

 

Thank you Paul and Vince.