QoS

Bl8ckr0uter

On our switches we have a very basic auto QoS generated policy. My boss wants me to make our policy work better. Does anyone have any QoS REAL WORLD best practices?

We are using a polycom system so I am going to have to tweak to QoS system to work for our vendor. We also want to improve out overall network performance. In order to that however, I need to know what are performance is which is why I made this thread http://www.techexams.net/forums/off-topic/55366-monitoring-utilization.html#post422710 They also want the iSCSI traffic optimized as well. We are using 3560s and 3750s.

I am reading this btw
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=qos+best+practices&aq=f&aqi=g1g-m1&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&fp=d2eda4910a7445ea
First hit.

jason_lunde

Sounds like you are being pretty careful, just make sure you stay that way. QoS is a tricky beast, and you can easily cripple a network. You should pick up Wendell Odoms QoS book, and if nothing else use it as a reference for this project. As far as real world, just make sure that you take the time to really identify your traffic and your businesses requirements. You will have to group and classify all of your traffic, and its pretty imperative that you get it correct the first time. QoS syntax is fairly tricky too if you new to it in the catalyst world. Again, just make sure you do your homework and know what your commands are doing.

That is a pretty good Cisco Doc btw. Nice find.

Bl8ckr0uter

Thanks for the suggestion. I guess I need to figure out how to group our traffic.. .

APA

Wendells QoS book is fantastic..... always refer to it and used it for the CCIP QoS exam as well

jason_lunde

So what speed is your network? Are you currently experiencing congestion somewhere within the network?

Bl8ckr0uter

Its 100m all throughout the lan.

As far as congestion, we are having some problems with our VOIP solution where you can hear popping or cracking from time to time, especially when you call our other site. We also want to optimize our switches for our iSCSI since our entire business runs off of it (quite literally).

Our phone vendor (before my time) came in and didn't secure or tune our switches so we have some security issues (some of which I am going to fix tonight) and we have some traffic coming to user vlans that we don't want (mainly iSCSI traffic). I still need to find a really good network analysis product. I want to use Wireshark but I think I need to get that book on it so I can know what the hell I am looking for.

I also need to optimize the network for this application and see what we can do to improve performance. And get an IDS/IPS running. And install monitoring. And get a management vlan and equipment installed. And leverage open source technologies when I can. And help our other admin with moving from SQL server 2000 to 2005. . . .