need feedback about bandwidth control & traffic shaping

[dmorris]

There are a *lot* of feature requests around managing and monitoring the bandwidth usage of the network. I'd like to hear some specific use cases around what you are looking to accomplish.

Assume that we had a new bandwidth management app that was simple and powerful - what kind of policies would people put in place on their networks?

some examples I've heard thus far:
- monitor bandwidth consumption (reports)
- visualize real-time bandwidth consumption
- restrict some applications/websites to certain allocations (youtube to 5kb/sec)
- prioritize traffic such that some activities can never take bandwidth from mission critical apps (voip, salesforce.com, etc)
- prioritize traffic such that latency critical applications don't suffer (voip, games, etc)
- give a specific user or machine a quota (500Mb/day)
- give everyone quotas (500Mb/day) and after they use the quota the have very little bandwidth (ie - the penalty box like a 10kb/sec limit)

[sky-knight]

That is a very nice list honestly...

Basically trying to leverage each existing rack module's detection criteria, to not only perform the requested block/pass currently offered but use that detection as a basis for bandwidth allocation.

As you say the ability to say, YouTube! only 5% of the total bandwidth available from any client... or even a few clients is quite powerful.

The current system works, but it is the old packet matching method that hales back to layer 3 firewalls.

What you have listed is layer 7 QoS.... new... interesting... powerful... and a massive sales tool.

[mcsdmike]

It would be nice to have an ACL style list where I could define for example

on this network 192.168.0.0/16

i could define 192.168.0.1 - 192.168.4.254 = max bandwidth (per host) 50kbps
192.168.1.126 = max bandwidth 200kbps
ect... (network range definition and an overriding per host allotment)

if you do a per service allocation then similarly have it acl'd so its able to be defined by priority of service and network/host priority.

[dmorris]

sky-knight: agreed on all points. we're thinking along the same lines here.

mcsdmike, great suggestions

[dmorris]

bump
if you have feedback on this - now is your chance!

[far182]

Thanks dmorris. I have been slammed since yesterday. I will take some time this evening and post what we are looking for. For now I can provide this addition:

We currently use Edgewaternetworks Edgemac devices for Voip deployments. The traffic shaping/ALG is extremely good. We have tested Untangle and it provides good (almost excellent) traffic shaping for VOIP as well. We prefer every other aspect of Untangle besides Edgewater's ability to score VOIP calls (MOS Scores. See Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_opinion_score ). We would love Untangle to shine in VOIP.

Requirements:

* Must be configurable to alert in syslog.
* Must log start/end of calls. At the end of the call it should display the lowest MOS score in the call and the average MOS score.
* Must be able to set a low MOS score threshold. Since 4.40 is perfect and 1 is lowest, we should be able to set a threshold of 3.98 (just an example) and have syslog report that the threshold was crossed.
* When an active call crosses below the threshold, it should make a syslog entry in real-time.
* Each call should have a unique ID number so that we can find calls in the log. Each syslog entry for call status should have the call ID in it.

Thanks!

[hescominsoon]

Originally Posted by dmorris

There are a *lot* of feature requests around managing and monitoring the bandwidth usage of the network. I'd like to hear some specific use cases around what you are looking to accomplish.

Assume that we had a new bandwidth management app that was simple and powerful - what kind of policies would people put in place on their networks?

some examples I've heard thus far:
- monitor bandwidth consumption (reports)
- restrict some applications/websites to certain allocations (youtube to 5kb/sec)
- prioritize traffic such that some activities can never take bandwidth from mission critical apps (voip, salesforce.com, etc)
- prioritize traffic such that latency critical applications don't suffer (voip, games, etc)
- give a specific user or machine a quota (500Mb/day)
- give everyone quotas (500Mb/day) and after they use the quota the have very little bandwidth (ie - the penalty box like a 10kb/sec limit)

go take a look at astaro's QOS if you want to see what i am after.. You can setup bandwidth pools or a general hard or soft limit on bandwidth. They do not offer an option for transfer limitations though which isn't really needed imo.

[far182]

Or maybe look at pfsense? Its free, easy to install in a VM, and you can quickly see a beautiful example of great traffic shaping. Add multi-wan & multi-lan to the mix, and you have a dynamite module on your hands!

[takoateli]

All the above just about does it for me. The one thing that is very important in my requirements for the traffic shaping is that the shaping be per user. We have a 512K down 128K up satellite connection. Even with QOS if one user does high priority traffic then it's possible even probable that that user's traffic will serious deteriorate the network for others. I know from following wireless ISP forum that this type of traffic shaping is the hardest to effectively accomplish, at least in a large scale wireless network. Perhaps it's easier in the typical environments that UT is deployed in. However, if you could accomplish an effective per user traffic shaping, not only prioritizing traffic but also so that the bandwidth is shared fairly between all users (for example all high priority traffic split that pool fairly, all medium priority traffic split that pool fairly, etc), then it would make your product very attractive to the WISP providers as well. Though I think that kind of behavior would make it more attractive to anyone. You just recently received good mention in the WISPA forum.

Greg

[tonydav]

I very much like how this functions in pfSense. Very good for VOIP and extremely easy to configure.