Vary Management Strategy by Time and Day

 Instructions to change bandwidth-allocation policies according to the clock or calendar

Occasionally, you might want to control performance differently at different times or on different days. Consider these examples:

• A teacher objects to instant messaging in her classroom during teaching hours, but it's okay during lunch or after school.
  
  
• A company's network administrator does not want to permit games or MP3 music downloads on weekdays, but feels that it should be okay on weekends.
  
  
• A sales-ordering application needs access to twice its usual bandwidth in the last two days of the month because the sales personnel typically deliver the most orders during those last two days.
  
  
• A bank's branch offices must synchronize their databases daily but have very constrained WAN links. They want to allow this synchronization to monopolize the links at night, but not during the day when other traffic must have priority.

You can vary your configuration details based on the day or the time of day. The choice of day can be daily, weekends, weekdays, specific dates, specific days of the week, and/or specific dates of the month.

Steps:

1. Create a traffic class for the traffic you want to control and schedule, if you don't already have one.
   
   For example, you could create a traffic class called OracleAccounts for Oracle traffic using the Accounts database.
   

2. Plan your management strategy and the PacketWise policies or partitions you'll need. You can use Policy/Partition Guidelines for help.
   
   For example, with a 128 Kbps link, you might want to contain OracleAccounts to 30 Kbps during business hours and allow it to fill the link after hours. And you always want the benefits of TCP Rate Control. You'd need:
   
   Rate policy with no guaranteed rate, burstable with priority 6. (all the time)
   Static partition of size 20 Kbps, burstable, 30 Kbps limit. (for business hours)
   Static partition of size 30 Kbps, burstable with no limit. (for after hours)
   
   
3. For those polices or partitions that you want all the time, simply apply them in your normal way. For example, set a rate policy.
   
   
4. For those partitions and polices that you want active only at certain times, determine the CLI (command-line interface) syntax to enforce your commands. For example, consult the CLI command partition apply.
   
   
5. Create a command file for each group of CLI commands that needs to be executed together.
   
   If you have many schedule-based changes, you might consider having command files named WeekdayMornings, WeekdayNights, EndOfMonth, and so on. Then you can insert all the CLI commands for all the changes required at the indicated times.
   
   For example, suppose you want different policies and partitions for both MP3 downloads and gaming based on weekend versus weekday. You need one command file for MP3s and gaming that contains the weekend polices and partitions, and another command file for the same traffic classes that contains the weekday policies and partitions.
   
   Remember, you need not include a CLI command in your command file unless it needs changing. All existing policies, partitions, and so on that are in force will remain so unless you include a command imposing change. So, for example, if you include gaming policies in command files for each Monday and Saturday, you needn't include any gaming policies in your command files for morning and night.
   
   
6. Test each command file with the run command and check that the configuration details that you intended to change were indeed changed.
   
   
7. Schedule the execution of each of your command files.