User's Manual

Components 635
Servers Step
You can select servers for prioritization or blocking. In terms of the
Prioritize Network Traffic Wizard, a server can be any device with an IP
address regardless of whether or not the device is present in the 3Com
Network Director map. This enables you to perform actions such as
blocking traffic to and from streaming media servers that are external to
your company or to prioritize traffic to and from your partners websites.
■ Prioritized Servers — when a server is prioritized, two things occur:
■ Traffic to or from the prioritized server will be treated as more
important than non-prioritized traffic by the configured devices.
Traffic will, therefore, flow through the network faster and with
less chance of being dropped.
■ Prioritizing the server overrides application blocking, so a server
selected for prioritization will still be able to use applications that
are selected for blocking without the devices in the network
dropping the application’s traffic. 3Com Network Director
configures devices that are capable of classifying traffic based upon
IP addresses to identify traffic going to or from a server selected for
prioritization. This is achieved by creating classifier rules that match
packets with either the destination or source IP address respectively
set to the IP address of the server. Traffic that matches these
classifier rules is mapped to the Business Critical service level. See
“
3Com Network Director Service Levels” on page 655 for
definitions of the service levels used by 3Com Network Director.
When you are configuring devices that are not capable of classifying
traffic based upon IP addresses, 3Com Network Director configures
these devices to identify traffic with the Business Critical DiffServ
codepoint. Traffic that matches this classifier rule is also mapped to
the Business Critical service level.
■ Blocked Servers — selecting a server for blocking simply causes
traffic to or from that server to be dropped by configured devices that
are capable of both classifying traffic based upon IP addresses and of
dropping traffic as a result of classification. 3Com Network Director
configures these devices to identify traffic going to or from a server
that has been selected for blocking. This is achieved by creating
classifier rules that match packets with either the destination or source
IP address respectively set to the IP address of the server. Traffic that
matches these classifier rules is mapped to the Drop service level. See
“
3Com Network Director Service Levels” on page 655 for definitions
of service levels used by 3Com Network Director.