Best Practices for Bandwidth Management

Congestion is unlikely on either of the LAN segments to which the Silver Peak device connects directly, since these are typically operating at 100Mbps or 1000Mbps.

In a typical deployment, congestion is most likely to arise at the near-end WAN interface.

With wise bandwidth management and QoS, the Silver Peak appliance can guarantee shaping and prioritization for all traffic. For smooth network operation, it’s wisest to consider your overall bandwidth allocation in advance and then to revisit it each time you add, edit, or remove a tunnel.

Summary of Bandwidth Assessment and Management Tasks

The following table summarizes the tasks when configuring multiple tunnels for an appliance and/or more than one traffic class per entity.

	Task	Notes	For detailed instructions, see...
1	Configure the maximum system bandwidth, based on the bandwidth of the WAN link.	Because of where network congestion typically occurs, you want to ensure that the appliance doesn’t deliver more than the WAN can manage.	“Configuring Max WAN Bandwidth”.
2	Configure traffic classes in the Shaper.	The same traffic classes manage optimized (tunnel) traffic and pass-through shaped traffic. You can configure up to 10 traffic classes for the physical WAN interface.	“Traffic Class Configuration”.
3	Configure the tunnel minimum bandwidth	This is a consideration when using Dynamic Rate Control.	“Dynamic Rate Control”.
4	Let the appliance negotiate tunnel maximum bandwidth(s)	When Auto BW is active (as it is by default), the appliance negotiates maximum bandwidth for each tunnel.	“Tunnel Auto BW”.
5	Configure your QoS Policy	Here you assign flows to the traffic classes you defined in the shaper.	“QoS Policy Page Organization and Management”. “Handling and Marking Packets”.
6	Review your configuration	Make sure that you haven’t over- or undersubscribed the link.

Please send comments or suggestions regarding user documentation to techpubs@silver-peak.com.