Users Guide
NOTE: The show cam-usage command provides much of the same information as the test cam-usage command, but
whether a policy-map can be successfully applied to an interface cannot be determined without first measuring how
many CAM entries the policy-map would consume; the test cam-usage command is useful because it provides this
measurement.
• Verify that there are enough available CAM entries.
test cam-usage
Dell# test cam-usage service-policy input pmap_l2 port-set 0 | port pipe
Port-pipe | CAM Partition | Available CAM | Estimated CAM | Status
=====================================================================
0 L2ACL 500 200 Allowed(2)
Configuring Weights and ECN for WRED
The WRED congestion avoidance functionality drops packets to prevent buffering resources from being consumed. Traffic is a mixture of
various kinds of packets. The rate at which some types of packets arrive might be greater than others. In this case, the space on the
buffer and traffic manager (BTM) (ingress or egress) can be consumed by only one or few types of traffic, leaving no space for other
types. You can apply a WRED profile to a policy-map so that the specified traffic can be prevented from consuming too much of the BTM
resources.
WRED drops packets when the average queue length exceeds the configured threshold value to signify congestion. ECN is a capability
that enhances WRED by marking the packets instead of causing WRED to drop them when the threshold value is exceeded. If you
configure ECN for WRED, devices employ ECN to mark the packets and reduce the rate of sending packets in a congested network.
In a best-effort network topology, data packets are transmitted in a manner in which latency or throughput is not maintained to be at an
effective level. Packets are dropped when the network experiences a large traffic load. This best-effort network deployment is not
suitable for applications that are time-sensitive, such as video on demand (VoD) or voice over IP (VoIP) applications. In such cases, you
can use ECN in conjunction with WRED to resolve the dropping of packets under congested conditions.
Using ECN, the packets are marked for transmission at a later time after the network recovers from the heavy traffic state to an optimal
load. In this manner, enhanced performance and throughput are achieved. Also, the devices can respond to congestion before a queue
overflows and packets are dropped, enabling improved queue management.
When a packet reaches the device with ECN enabled for WRED, the average queue size is computed. To measure the average queue size,
a weight factor is used. This weight factor is user-configurable. You can use the wred weight number command to configure the
weight for the WRED average queue size. The mark probability value is the number of packets dropped when the average queue size
reaches the maximum threshold value.
The weight factor is set to zero by default, which causes the same behavior as dropping of packets by WRED during network loads or also
called instantaneous ECN marking. In a topology in which congestion of the network varies over time, you can specify a weight to enable a
smooth, seamless averaging of packets to handle the sudden overload of packets based on the previous time sampling performed. You
can specify the weight parameter for front-end and backplane ports separately in the range of 0 through 15.
You can enable WRED and ECN capabilities per queue for granularity. You can disable these functionality per queue, and you can also
specify the minimum and maximum buffer thresholds for each color-coding of the packets. You can configure maximum drop rate
percentage of yellow and green profiles. You can set up these parameters for both front-end and backplane ports.
Global Service Pools With WRED and ECN Settings
Support for global service pools is now available. You can configure global service pools that are shared buffer pools accessed by multiple
queues when the minimum guaranteed buffers for the queue are consumed. Two service pools are used– one for loss-based queues and
the other for lossless (priority-based flow control (PFC)) queues. You can enable WRED and ECN configuration on the global service-
pools.
You can define WRED profiles and weight on each of the global service-pools for both loss-based and lossless (PFC) service- pools. The
following events occur when you configure WRED and ECN on global service-pools:
• If WRED/ECN is enabled on the global service-pool with threshold values and if it is not enabled on the queues, WRED/ECN are not
effective based on global service-pool WRED thresholds. The queue on which the traffic is scheduled must contain WRED/ECN
settings, which are enabled for WRED, to be valid for that traffic.
• When WRED is configured on the global service-pool (regardless of whether ECN on global service-pool is configured), and one or
more queues have WRED enabled and ECN disabled, WRED is effective for the minimum of the thresholds between the queue
threshold and the service-pool threshold.
Quality of Service (QoS)
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