SonicOSX 7 Profile Objects
Understanding Bandwidth Profiles
Bandwidth management (BWM) is a means of allocating bandwidth resources to critical applications on a network through the use of an established use profile.
SonicOS offers an integrated traffic shaping mechanism through its outbound (Egress) and inbound (Ingress) BWM interfaces. Egress BWM can be applied to traffic sourced from Trusted and Public zones traveling to Untrusted and Encrypted zones. Ingress BWM can be applied to traffic sourced from Untrusted and Encrypted zones traveling to Trusted and Public zones.
The SonicWall security appliance uses BWM to control ingress and egress traffic. BWM allows network administrators to guarantee minimum bandwidth and prioritize traffic based on policies created in the OBJECT | Profiles > Bandwidth page of the management interface. By controlling the amount of bandwidth to an application or user, you can prevent a small number of applications or users to consume all available bandwidth. Balancing the bandwidth allocated to different network traffic and then assigning priorities to traffic can improve network performance.
Although BWM is a fully integrated Quality of Service (QoS) system, wherein classification and shaping is performed on the single SonicWall appliance, effectively eliminating the dependency on external systems thereby obviating the need for marking, it is possible to concurrently configure BWM and QoS (layer 2 and/or layer 3 marking) settings on a single Access Rule. This allows those external systems to benefit from the classification performed on the firewall even after it has already shaped the traffic. For BWM QoS details, refer to Managing Quality of Service.
BWM Traffic Priority Queues lists the SonicOS traffic priority queues.
| 0 – Realtime | 3 – Medium High | 6 – Low |
| 1 – Highest | 4 – Medium | 7 – Lowest |
| 2 – High | 5 – Medium Low |
Various types of bandwidth management are available and can be selected on the OBJECT | Profiles > Bandwidth page.
| BWM Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Advanced | Enables Advanced Bandwidth Management. Maximum egress and ingress bandwidth limitations can be configured on any interface, per interface, by configuring bandwidth objects, access rules, and application policies and attaching them to the interface. |
| Global |
All zones can have assigned guaranteed and maximum bandwidth to services and have prioritized traffic. When global BWM is enabled on an interface, all of the traffic to and from that interface is bandwidth managed according to the priority queue. Default Global BWM queues:
4 Medium is the default priority for all traffic that is not managed by an Access rule or an Application Control Policy that is BWM enabled. For traffic more than 1 Gbps, maximum bandwidth is limited to 1 Gbps because of queuing, which may limit the number of packets processed. |
| None | (Default) Disables BWM. |
If the bandwidth management type is None, and there are three traffic types that are using an interface, if the link capacity of the interface is 100 Mbps, the cumulative capacity for all three types of traffic is 100 Mbps.
When Global bandwidth management is enabled on an interface, all traffic to and from that interface is bandwidth managed. If the available ingress and egress traffic is configured at 10 Mbps, then by default, all three traffic types are sent to the medium priority queue. The medium priority queue, by default, has a guaranteed bandwidth of 50 percent and a maximum bandwidth of 100 percent. If no Global bandwidth management policies are configured, the cumulative link capacity for each traffic type is 10 Mbps.
BWM rules each consume memory for packet queuing, so the number of allowed queued packets and rules on SonicOS is limited by platform (values are subject to change).
Global uses the unused guaranteed bandwidth from other queues for maximum bandwidth. If there is only default or single-queue traffic and all the queues have a total of 100% allocated as guaranteed, Global uses the unused global bandwidth from other queues to give you up to maximum bandwidth for the default/single queue.
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