About application slices

Shaping policies determine the amount of bandwidth that specified applications can use. Additionally, you can prioritize bandwidth for specific applications, or application groups. You do this by slicing up the allocated bandwidth, according to the relative importance of the application. You can also apply an additional cap to the amount of bandwidth used by that application.

Before configuring application slices, it might be useful to the consider the following:

  • By configuring an application slice, you're saying that you want to control traffic from specified applications, and application groups.
  • Applications not specified aren't prevented from using bandwidth. The amount of bandwidth is relative to previously specified applications.
  • Relative weight refers to the relative importance of that application, or application group, specified as an integer between 1 and 100. It might be useful to configure the first application of that slice with a Relative weight of 10, then base other applications and weights around that. For example, if you configure a second slice with a weight of 20, you're saying that applications from slice two receive two times as much bandwidth than those in slice one.

These slices are only used as a prioritization method when available bandwidth for that class is nearing capacity.

Example

For example, a class is assigned the predefined Business shaping policy:

This class is given a Dynamic sharing type, with 2 megabits per second of incoming, and 2 megabits per second of outgoing bandwidth. The Business shaping policy slices up the 2 megabits per second of bandwidth as follows:

  • Traffic from Collaboration, Mail, Remote Access, and VPN / Tunneling applications are more important than all other traffic originating from IP addresses assigned to that class.
  • If traffic for all four application groups was detected originating from IP addresses assigned to the class, bandwidth would be shared as follows:
    • Collaboration applications would receive two times more bandwidth than Mail applications (10 being two times more than 5).
    • Remote Access and VPN / Tunneling services receive two times more bandwidth than Collaboration applications, and four times more bandwidth than Mail applications.
    • All other traffic would receive a similar share of bandwidth as Remote Access and VPN / Tunneling services.

If traffic matching only one application slice is present, this would use up the full 2 megabits per second allocation as needed.