Reserve Bandwidth

Instructions to reserve bandwidth for an application or any traffic class that tends to suffer insufficient performance or lose the battle for bandwidth to more aggressive applications

You can reserve bandwidth and therefore protect performance with a PacketWise partition. For example, you could reserve 30 percent of your capacity for SAP.

Although a partition does indeed protect an entire application or traffic class, it does not enforce any particular performance standards on each session or each user of an application. A rate policy is the appropriate construct for that goal.

Procedure:

1. Create a traffic class to contain the traffic you want to protect, if one does not already exist.
   
   Or, alternatively, create a traffic folder and move several related traffic classes that you'd like to protect together into the folder.
   
   Remember to make sure you have corresponding classes in both Inbound and Outbound branches of the traffic tree.
   
   For background information, see Traffic Tree Overview and/or Traffic Classification Overview.
   
   
2. Decide the minimum amount of your WAN capacity you want to devote to your traffic class. Remember that if the bandwidth is unused, PacketWise automatically loans it to other traffic in need, so it's never wasted.
   

   For example, if you have a T1 or E1 WAN link and want to reserve 30 percent for SAP, you could choose 450 Kbps for each direction.

   Decide the maximum amount of your WAN capacity that you want your traffic class to be able to access.
   
   Some applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, need both protection and limits.

   For help in determining appropriate minimum and maximum amounts of bandwidth, see Sizing a Static Partition.
   
   

3. Create a partition to reserve capacity for the total of all traffic in your traffic class. In the Size field, enter the minimum you determined in the previous step. If you want the partition to use available excess bandwidth when needed, select the Burstable checkbox and enter the maximum you determined in the previous step.
   
   For background information, see Partition Overview.