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Packeteer, Inc.
10201 N. De Anza Blvd., Cupertino, CA 95014 Tel: (408) 873-4400 info@packeteer.com | www.packeteer.com
Packeteer, the Packeteer logo, combinations of Packeteer and the Packeteer logo, as well as AppCelera, PacketSeeker, PacketShaper, PacketShaper Xpress, PacketWise, and PolicyCenter are trademarks or registered trademarks of Packeteer, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Other product and company names used in this document are used for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of other companies and are the property of their respective owners. Copyright 2001-2004 Packeteer, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, photocopied, stored on a retrieval system, transmitted, or translated into another language without the express written consent of Packeteer, Inc. Packeteer software is licensed, not sold, and its use is subject to the license terms set forth in the end user license agreement. (05/2004)
Table of Contents
Enhancing MPLS Network Performance ......................................................................................... 3 Brief MPLS Review.........................................................................................................................3 Limitations and Solutions for Delivering QoS With MPLS ............................................................4 Challenge 1: Match the Right Traffic and Service Class .................................................................5 Precise Traffic Classification ...................................................................................................6 Challenge 2: Prevent a Bottleneck ...................................................................................................8 Challenge 3: Provide Performance Feedback .................................................................................. 9 Measuring Response Times....................................................................................................10 Access to MPLS Performance Data .......................................................................................11 Other Benefits of Using Packeteer in MPLS Networks ................................................................. 12 Preparing for MPLS ...............................................................................................................12 Weighing the Cost of a Premium Class of Service ................................................................13 Marking, Pushing, Popping, and Swapping ...........................................................................13 Delivering Network Backup...................................................................................................13 Assisting Voice/Data Network Convergence......................................................................... 14 Summary ........................................................................................................................................14
Packeteer, Inc.
MPLS has become a leading vehicle for connecting an organizations distributed locations. It offers advantages to both service providers and enterprises. For the service provider, MPLS reduces cost, simplifies provisioning, provides wider service coverage, and enables differentiated services. In addition to the promise of multiple levels of quality of service (QoS), MPLS offers the enterprise a meshed architecture, scalability, and network convergence, eliminating the need for multiple networks. Service providers need to make their bandwidth services more valuable to enterprises. After all, pitching bandwidth as a stand-alone commodity is no longer compelling. One opportunity for service expansion is differentiated performance standards. Meanwhile, enterprises realize the importance of ensuring that key business applications operate consistently, reliably, and promptly requirements that become essential as organizations adopt converged networks supporting voice, video, and data. Based on these advantages, its no wonder that MPLS, with its ability to offer different performance levels to different applications, seems to be the ideal solution for both parties. On paper, it all makes sense. However, once MPLS is implemented, organizations frequently discover that placing key applications into premium service classes does not reap the expected benefits. What goes wrong? Bandwidth contention within service classes, overloaded premium classes, bottlenecks outside the MPLS cloud they all can result in poor and unpredictable application performance. Furthermore, the complex requirement of mapping large numbers of applications (often numbering in the hundreds) to a relatively small number of MPLS classes creates confusion, and it leaves businesses with unfulfilled performance and cost-benefit expectations. Packeteer, the leading provider of application traffic management solutions, offers an integrated platform that addresses the obstacles associated with MPLS networks. Packeteer boosts application performance, manages the complexities of juggling each service class traffic load, eases bandwidth bottlenecks, and verifies application and service-level performance, providing a very cost-effective complement to MPLS. This paper details the obstacles that emerge in MPLS environments and the value Packeteer brings to application performance as it solves these operational issues.
Hossein Eslambolchi, CTO and CIO of AT&T; President of AT&T-Labs; from Point of View/Networking and Business Strategy, 06/03/2003. 2 IDC, U.S. IP VPN Services Forecast, 2002-2007 (IDC # 28575).
Packeteer, Inc.
MPLS solved the problem that router manufacturers faced when incorporating QoS into very large IP-VPN networks: ensuring that each and every router can identify and process each and every traffic flow appropriately requires so much processing power as to be ineffective and non-scaleable. A better approach, and the one that MPLS adopts, is to label traffic flows at the edge of the network and let core routers identify the required class of service with a simple and quick label check. MPLS reduces the burden of differentiating types of traffic and assigning appropriate class-of-service labels by focusing the task on the edge of the MPLS network. The onus is usually on a router, called the label edge router, or LER. Optimally, the MPLS labels indicating the best and fastest service classes go into the most urgent applications packets (and only the most urgent applications packets).
Packeteer complements MPLS installations and overcomes each of the three QoS challenges listed above with pragmatic, real-world solutions. Packeteer offers visibility into and control of application traffic and enhances MPLS performance gains as it: Detects, identifies, and classifies diverse applications, assigning distinct QoS tags Packeteer, Inc.
Ensures that the traffic within a particular MPLS service class is the right traffic, meant for that class Eases the bottlenecks that form at the entry points to MPLS networks Extends MPLS performance benefits to the network edge and users premises Measures and graphs per-application and per-MPLS-class performance, enabling assessment of service level agreement (SLA) compliance
Unlike other elements of the MPLS network, the enterprise typically owns and manages Packeteer products. A service provider can also use Packeteer to offer customers additional services. Packeteer appliances are deployed at the network edge just before each locations entry point to the MPLS network.
Packeteer appliances sit on the LAN immediately before the service providers routers leading into and out of the MPLS network.
Because the routers at the edge of the MPLS network use port numbers to identify traffic, most service providers require organizations to manually map each TCP port number and IP address to each application and user, and then in turn to a provisioned MPLS class. Even if a business doesnt mind tending to this manual-mapping task, another fundamental problem remains. Once traffic is assigned to an MPLS class, any single flow can consume the class entire bandwidth. One highcapacity user or one flow from an unsanctioned bandwidth-hungry application can undermine performance of ERP or other mission-critical applications. Packeteer, Inc. 5
Without tools to differentiate and analyze each application, the premium MPLS class traffic can appear to be in compliance with the providers service level agreement. However, behind the scenes, rogue traffic might be the only beneficiary of costly premium performance. Label edge routers application classification capabilities are limited. They lack precision and accuracy when tagging or labeling MPLS traffic. This is the core problem behind the discrepancy in organizations expected and actual application performance.
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Packeteer, Inc.
Some of the applications and protocols Packeteer automatically detects, identifies, and classifies include:
Client/Server
CVS FIX (Finance) Folding@Home INFOC-RTMS INT-1 (Unisys Interact) MATIP (Airline) MeetingMaker NetIQ AppMngr OpenConnect JCP PEPGate (Attachmate) Unisys-TCPA
File Server
AFS CIFS-TCP CU-Dev lockd Microsoft-ds NetBIOS-IP NFS Novell NetWare5 rsync SunND
Music P2P
Aimster Apple-iTunes AudioGalaxy Bit Torrent Blubster DirectConnect EDonkey FileRogue Filetopia Furthurnet Gnutella
Acquisition Ares BearShare Furi Gnotella Gnucleus gtk-gnutella LimeWire MyNapster Mactella Morpheus Mutella Nap Share Phex Qtraxmax Qtella Shareaza toadnode XoloX Emule Overnet Rhapsody Mac Satellite
Network Management
Cisco Discovery Day-Time ICMP(by packet type) IPComp Microsoft SMS NTP RSVP SMS SNMP SYSLOG Time Server
Session
GoToMyPC pcAnywhere REXEC radmin rlogin rsh Telnet Timbuktu VNC Xwindows
Content Delivery
Ariel Backweb Chaincast EntryPoint Kontiki Marimba NewsStand PointCast WebShots
Games
Asherons Call Battle.net Diablo II Doom EverQuest Half-Life Kali LucasArts (Jedi*) MSN Zone Mythic Quake I, II, & III SonyOnline Tribes I,II Unreal Warcraft III Yahoo! Games
Messaging
AOL IM,
Talk, Image,File, ISP,
Print
IPP LPR TN3287 TN5250p
RDP/Terminal Server
Voice over IP
CiscoCTI Clarent CUSeeMe Dialpad H.323 I-Phone MCK Commun. Megaco Micom VIP MGCP Net2Phone RTP RTCP SIP Skinny (SCCP) T.120 VDOPhone
Routing
AURP BGP CBT DRP EGP EIGRP IGMP IGP MPLS (+tag, +app) OSPF PIM RARP RIP Spanning Tree VLAN (802.1p/q)
MiddleWare
CORBA Java RMI SmartSockets SunRPC (dyn port) JavaClient
Healthcare
DICOM HL7
MultiMedia
MPEG (Audio, Video) Multi-cast NetShow NetMeeting QuickTime Radio@Netscape Real (Audio, Video) RTP RTSP SHOUTcast Streamworks VideoFrame WebEx WinampStream WinMedia
Host Access
ATSTCP Attachmate Persoft Persona SHARESUDP SMTBF TN3270 TN5250
Directory Services
CRS DHCP DNS DPA Finger Ident Kerberos LDAP RADIUS RRP SSDP TACACS whois WINS
Internet
ActiveX BITS FTP, Passive FTP Gopher HTTP HTTP Tunnel IP, IPv6, IPIP, UDP, TCP IRC Mime type NNTP Socks2http SSHTCP SSL TFTP UUCP URL Web browser type
Amster audioGnome File Navigator Gnapster Grokster gtk napster jnapster MacStar Maxter My Napster Napigator NapMX Napster Fast Search Napster, MacOSX OpenNap Rapster Snap Spotlight WebNap WinMX
Security Protocol
DLS DPA GRE IPMobility IPSEC ISAKMP/IKE key exch L2TP PPTP RC5DES SOCKS Proxy SSH SSL (+shell) swIPe
Packeteer can classify traffic by a wide range of variables, including the following: Advanced Layer 7 application signatures Application sub-classification including Oracle and PostgreSQL (by database), Citrix (by published application or priority tag), FTP (by file name or extension), NNTP (by name or type of newsgroup), VoIP (by protocol or CODECs) HTTP sub-classification by URL, URL wildcard, content type, MIME type, browser type, HTTP tunnel, HTTP 1.1 virtual server SSL sub-classification by certificate common name Packeteer, Inc. 7
Layer 4 UDP and TCP ports, port ranges, and port lists Layer 3 IP addresses, address ranges, subnets, subnet ranges, MAC addresses, host lists, and LANs or physical device QoS markings, including DiffServ, IP-ToS, IP-CoS, IP precedence, MPLS label, MPLS experimental bits Frame relay interface, PVC/DLCI, ATM PVC, ATM interface, ISL-VLAN, 802.1q-VLAN, 802.1p-LAN
Once Packeteer identifies each passing packet, it can tag each packet with a DiffServ or IP TOS (type of service) identifier to give LERs the criteria they need to assign proper MPLS labels. As Packeteer identifies, differentiates, and tags applications, it ensures that only appropriate applications are assigned to any MPLS service class. It eliminates the contention issue that happens when too many applications go into the same service class because of a lack of visibility into various types of traffic. The frequency of missed SLAs declines. For example, with Packeteer, SAP and Oracle traffic can share one service class or have two distinct classes. Either way, they can sit in a separate MPLS service class than the best-effort class used for email and downloads. In another example, Citrix Published Applications and NFuse (using the ever-popular port 80) can have a higher service class than that assigned to web surfing and file sharing, also on port 80. Typically, the enterprise does not get involved with MPLS labels, leaving all MPLS involvement (including labels) to the service provider. However, Packeteer does have the ability to tag packets directly with MPLS labels if the enterprise or service provider wishes to do so.
An MPLS class of service is based upon a given traffic load. If the load grows too large, the MPLS implementation can drop excess traffic into a lower class of service. The portion of traffic that gets demoted is not necessarily the applications that someone would choose for slower service. Packeteer can ensure that the amount of traffic Packeteer, Inc. 8
entering an MPLS class does not exceed the expected and predefined volume for that class, preventing unexpected drops in service. With Packeteer, organizations can: Protect the performance of important applications, such as SAP and Oracle, or all applications in a premium MPLS class of service Enforce limits on traffic volume in each MPLS class of service Provision steady streams for voice or video traffic to ensure smooth performance Stop applications or users from monopolizing the link Contain unsanctioned and recreational traffic such as KaZaA and AudioGalaxy Reserve or cap bandwidth using an explicit rate, percentage of capacity, or priority Strike a balance between consistent access and a bandwidth limit for applications such as Microsoft Exchange that are both bandwidth-hungry and critically important Allow immediate passage for small, delay-sensitive traffic such as Telnet
With Packeteers control features, performance matches application characteristics, business requirements, and user needs.
These graphs compare usage and efficiency, before and after using Packeteers control features. Bandwidth usage smoothes out and avoids spiky peaks and valleys that create inconsistent delays. Retransmissions and their wasted bandwidth are all but eliminated.
Packeteer, Inc.
Both providers and enterprises need precise performance measurements for flexible intervals of time. Both parties also need to be able to divide delay measurements between the provider and enterprises area of responsibility. Traditional methods for measuring MPLS SLAs provide information only on the performance of a service class aggregate traffic. Enterprises enter a contract for delay, availability, throughput, and/or other metrics, based on averages in each service class. If one particular application in the MPLS class suffers poor performance, it is quite possible that the overall SLA for the class would remain compliant. It is important for any organization that uses MPLS for application QoS to be able to measure all metrics for a single specific application. In addition, when auditing SLA compliance, averages based on long sample periods are of less value than exact information based on instantaneous peaks and short-term averages. Packeteers comprehensive reports provide a clear view of historical performance, load, and efficiency. Extensive measurement data lives on board for up to two months and forms the foundation for Packeteers reports, all accessible with a web browser. More than 100 types of metrics are available for export and incorporation into third-party reporting tools. In addition, Packeteer ReportCenter can centralize reporting functions for multiple Packeteer appliances at edge locations (all the MPLS network entry points at branch offices, for example). ReportCenter can render many additional predefined reports and store measurement data for long periods of time.
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View current and historical performance data in intuitive tables and graphs, in a MIB (management information base) via an XML API or as raw data. SNMP management tools and third-party reporting tools integrate smoothly.
With a mechanism to compare actual and anticipated performance on an MPLS network, service-level agreements become more than empty promises.
See total transaction times divided into their network and server components. This graph shows that response time has been sporadically slow with frequent spikes. In addition, it shows that it was not the server that was causing the problems it was the network. If this is a graph of a critical application, its performance definitely needs some help. Some of Packeteers control features and perhaps a different MPLS service class are in order.
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Load Organizations are often confounded when trying to select the sizes for each of their MPLS service classes. How big should the most premium class be? How about the best-effort class that will support all leftover traffic? Packeteer automatically measures load for each traffic category as it passes. If the organization classifies its auto-discovered traffic types into categories for each intended MPLS service class, then it can see each MPLS class load even before the MPLS network exists.
Pre-MPLS baseline picture MPLS networks should improve the consistency and speed of critical applications performance. But improvements are difficult to verify without a basis of comparison a performance before picture. Packeteer can measure application performance before and after MPLS deployment. Packeteer recommends three performance snapshots one before MPLS and traffic managements control features are applied; one before MPLS and after control features are applied; and one after both. These three snapshots provide a complete picture.
settings for bandwidth-allocation policies, application priorities, and traffic marking. Although intervals of normal usage on the primary network might feature a mix of applications with network access, back-up mode might permit network access only to critical applications and save non-critical applications until spare bandwidth is available. Many other strategies are possible.
Once VoIP and data are both active on one network, Packeteer can:
Summary
As a growing number of organizations turn to MPLS networks for network convergence and a range of service levels, the need for assistance in MPLS preparation and delivery of end-to-end quality of service becomes more significant. Packeteer provides that assistance. Incorporating Packeteer in MPLS networks from planning through management offers compelling advantages. It helps determine what to purchase; identifies and marks the application traffic needing special handling; assesses performance; and keeps traffic sailing smoothly at the entry and exit points of an MPLS network, extending the performance advantages of an MPLS core network all the way to the edge. With Packeteer, network and application performance align with business needs. If youd like more information about Packeteer solutions, consult Packeteers web site or call 408-873-4400 or 800-697-2253.
Packeteer, Inc.
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