We’re starting to experiment with streaming video from site to site, but I’m looking for some guidance on bandwidth management as we’ve never set this up before. Our streaming appliance is a Teradek VidiU, the video gets sent out to Churchstreaming.tv, and they’ve set up a Roku channel for us. Then the feed is picked up by, you guessed it, a Roku on the other end. Both sites have SonicWALL TZ205 firewalls in place. The feed has tested out well so far, except for when another user on the sending side network started uploading footage to Vimeo. Once the upload started, it broke the existing VidiU connection. Wondering if setting up bandwidth management on the SonicWALL would help to prioritize the VidiU feed?
Yup, Sonicwall BWM is basically QoS, I imagine it would help solve your problem. I’m guessing your bottleneck is your WAN connection, although if it’s your LAN connection you can do roughly the same thing on that. If you’re overloading your Sonicwall’s max connections or throughput bandwidth, this will not help you as much. You should checkt to see what security services you have enabled, as that will lower your throughput - on the TZ205 if you have IPS turned on you drop down to 60Mbps, and if you turn on Gateway Antivirus it’s 50Mbps.
You’ll need to set the max bandwidth available on your WAN connections, then set up BWM rules to prioritize your streaming traffic and/or guarantee it a minimum amount of bandwidth, then create access rules (or use existing ones) and attach the BWM rules to those access rules. It’ll give you statistics to show how it’s working. It’s also easy to disable, if you run into any unexpected difficulties. Take a look here: https://support.sonicwall.com/kb/sw11092
We don’t have IPS turned on or Gateway Antivirus. I contacted SonicWALL support for help with setting up the BWM, because I’ve never done it before and I didn’t want to take down the network. The agent set it up but it didn’t seem to be specific enough because it didn’t specify the VidiU or the Roku on the other end. I added the VidiU and Roku as address objects and tried to modify the access rules, but when I applied it, it took down the network, so I missed something. I deleted the rule and brought the network back up, but I don’t understand what I did wrong. Dealing with support is so difficult because I can barely understand what they are saying… Difficult to ask questions when I don’t totally understand what I’m doing and there’s a language barrier.
I made this blog post 7 years ago but the bandwidth policies haven’t changed much on sonicwall since then. It might help you out. We used this method until moving off sonicwall two years ago. http://www.jeremygood.net/2010/10/bandwidth-management-on-sonicwall-nsa.html
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