Owner's Manual

Chapter 12. Policy Manager | 294
12
12. Policy Manager
This chapter includes the following sections:
• Overview on page 294
• Creating and Editing Policies on page 294
• Applying Policies on page 297
Overview
One of the processes that make up the XCM8800 system is the policy manager. The policy
manager is responsible for maintaining a set of policy statements in a policy database and
communicating these policy statements to the applications that request them.
Policies are used by the routing protocol applications to control the advertisement, reception,
and use of routing information by the switch. Using policies, a set of routes can be selectively
permitted (or denied) based on their attributes, for advertisements in the routing domain. The
routing protocol application can also modify the attributes of the routing information, based on
the policy statements.
Policies are also used by the access control list (ACL) application to perform packet filtering and
forwarding decisions on packets. The ACL application will program these policies into the packet
filtering hardware on the switch. Packets can be dropped, forwarded, moved to a different QoS
profile, or counted, based on the policy statements provided by the policy manager.
Creating and Editing Policies
A policy is created by writing a text file that contains a series of rule entries describing match
conditions and actions to take. Policies are created by writing a text file on a separate machine
and then downloading it to the switch. Once on the switch, the file is then loaded into a policy
database to be used by applications on the switch. Policy text files can also be created and
edited directly on the switch.