IPQoS

Peter Baer Galvin

IP Quality of Service (IPQoS) is a part of the Solaris Resource Manager, and is included in Solaris 9. It purports to allow management of network traffic, to the point of dictating how much network bandwidth each application can use. This month, the Solaris Companion explores the theory and fact of IPQoS.

Theory

Sun's old Bandwidth Manager has been replaced in Solaris 9 9/02 with the IPQoS facility. This facility is compliant and interoperable with IETF Differentiated Services standards and specifications. (For more details see RFC 2474 and RFC 2475 at http://ietf.org.) It is also integrated with the other Solaris Resource Manager features (as described in the April and June 2003 Solaris Companion). But what exactly is IPQoS?

According to Sun's documentation, "IP Quality of Service (IPQoS) enables system administrators to provide different levels of network service to customers and to critical applications. By using IPQoS, the administrator can set up service-level agreements. These agreements provide an ISP's clients with varying levels of service that are based on a price structure. A company could also use IPQoS to prioritize among applications so that critical applications get a higher quality of service than less critical ones."

IPQoS is important to Sun's future. It will be a key component of data center virtualization, as systems take on multiple roles, and as automated deployment replaces hand-tuned architectures and implementations. It can also be helpful in capacity planning and chargeback via its integration with accounting. Furthermore, IPQoS is the networking core of the forthcoming "containers" technology found in Solaris Next (see the "Solaris Containers -- How Advances in Server Virtualization Will Simplify Service Manageability" whitepaper at: http://wwws.s