Verifying QoS configurations
After you apply your settings, you can verify whether the traffic is categorized in the correct class by choosing Reports > Networking: Outbound QoS and viewing the report. You can verify whether the configuration is honoring the bandwidth allocations by reviewing the Outbound QoS and Inbound QoS reports.
MX-TCP queue policies
When you define a QoS class, you can enable a maximum speed TCP (MX-TCP) queue policy, which prioritizes TCP/IP traffic to provide more throughput for high loss links or links that have large bandwidth and high latency LFNs. Some use case examples are:
• Data-Intensive Applications—Many large, data-intensive applications running across the WAN can negatively impact performance due to latency, packet loss, and jitter. MX-TCP enables you to maximize your TCP throughput for data intensive applications.
• High Loss Links—TCP doesn’t work well on misconfigured links (for example, an under-sized bottleneck queue) or links with even a small amount of loss, which leads to link under-utilization. If you have dedicated point-to-point links and want those links to function at predefined rates, configure the SteelHead to prioritize TCP traffic.
• Privately Owned Links—If your network includes privately owned links dedicated to rate-based TCP, configure the SteelHead to prioritize TCP traffic.
After enabling the MX-TCP queue to forward TCP traffic regardless of congestion or packet loss, you can assign QoS rules that incorporate this policy only to links where TCP is of exclusive importance. These exceptions to QoS classes apply to MX-TCP queues:
• The Link Share Weight parameter doesn’t apply to MX-TCP queues. When you select the MX-TCP queue, the Link Share Weight parameter doesn’t appear. There’s a maximum bandwidth setting for MX-TCP that allows traffic to burst to the maximum level if the bandwidth is available.
• MX-TCP queues apply only to optimized traffic (that is, no pass-through traffic).
• MX-TCP queues can’t be configured to contain more bandwidth than the license limit.
When enabling MX-TCP, ensure that the QoS rule is at the top of QoS rules list. Here are the basic steps for configuring MX-TCP. Enabling this feature is optional.
1. Select each WAN interface and define the bandwidth link rate for each interface.
2. Add an MX-TCP class for the traffic flow. Make sure you specify MX-TCP as your queue.
3. Define QoS rules to point to the MX-TCP class.
4. Select the Enable Inbound or Outbound QoS Shaping check box and click Save. Your changes take effect immediately.
5. Optionally, to test a single connection, change the WAN socket buffer size (to at least the BDP). You must set this parameter on both the client-side and the server-side appliances.
6. Check and locate the inner connection.
7. Check the throughput.