Need Help Setting up QoS on Cisco 2960 Switches

Does anyone have any experience with QoS on Cisco switches? We have two locations separated by an E-Lan. We want to prioritize streaming video between the two locations but there will also be a lot of data going over the line too. There is no layer 3 stuff going on only layer 2, so I guess that means I’m really trying to setup COS? I’ve never done this before so I’d appreciate any advice. Thanks.

Hey Danny,

We’ve implemented QOS in our Cisco environment. I’m going to have to do some verifying on the possibility of that strictly on a L2 network, because I believe we had to implement it beginning at our L3 devices.

Feel free to email me your info at caleb (dot) stanley (at) pinelake (dot) org and we can connect and see what we can figure out.

The QoS capabilities of switches aren’t fantastic, but everything you can do on L3 you can do on L2. You generally want to make sure your DSCP tags are getting set properly and then point tags into hardware QoS queues. Since switches have pretty small buffers and everything happens in specialized silicon you’ll be able to handle microbursts well but keep in mind the ultimate answer if it absolutely has to work is that you might end up deploying some full-fledged routers so that you can deploy the much more capable HQOS.

Thanks Alex…this is helpful

Thanks Caleb. I forwarded some more info to your email.