Bandwidth Management using Switches

[Ameet Patel_1]

Hi All,

I am having a new 100 MB Internet connection being supplied in my office. It is a Fibre connection but it will be converted and presented via Cat5e cable. We have people (Client B) sitting in our office that are on a totally different network to ours and must be kept seperate but will share my new internet connection. I want to allocate 80 MB Internet bandwidth to my network and give client B 20 MB.

I do not want to spend thousands of pounds on network bandwidth management devices so I have been reading up on layer 3 switches being able to do the bandwidth management. So I want to setup a switch with two VLANs, VLAN1 for me and VLAN2 for Client B. Then set bandwidths on each VLAN to my desired number.

Questions.
1) Can I do this with a layer 3 switch?
2) what switch do you recommend bearing in mind I will not want more then 8 ports ever?
3) Will I need to use VLANs to set this up?
4) Has anyone ever done this and do you have a basic configuration I can use?
5) Are there any special features I need to turn on?

Thanks in advance for helping me on this matter.

Regards
Ameet

[netvis]

Do you want to cap the client's bandwidth to 20MB or simply ensure an 80/20 split when the link is busy?

If your client has their own switch attached to one of your ports, you can rate limit the port on a ProCurve using the rate-limit command:

int rate-limit all < in | out > | kbps

An alternative approach would be to use QoS features to mark you customer's traffic as lower priority. By adjusting the buffers allocated to the customer's priority class, you can ensure a 80/20 bandwidth split during peak periods.

Finally, HP switches support sFlow traffic monitoring that will allow you to see which users and applications are using bandwidth. The free sFlowTrend tool (http://www.sflowtrend.com) is a good place to start. Other tools are listed at http://www.sflow.org/products/collectors.php. For more information on sFlow, see http://www.sflow.org/ and http://blog.sflow.com/