Configuring QoS on Palo Alto Firewalls: Class-based Policies, QoS Profiles, Enabling QoS on Firewall Interfaces
This article’s purpose is to help you quickly master Palo Alto QoS concepts and learn to configure QoS on Palo Alto Firewallsin a simple and efficient way. QoS is considered a complicated topic however thanks to Palo Alto’s intuitive firewall GUI interface and our real-scenarios, you’ll quickly grasp all necessary QoS basics and be ready to implement your own QoS policies!
You’ll learn basic QoS terms such as Ingress and Egresstraffic, Differentiated Service Code Point (DSCP), Traffic Policing, Traffic Shaping, Palo Alto QoS Classes, Palo Alto QoS Policies, how to build Palo Alto QoS policies, how to configure Palo Alto QoS Classes and finally how to enable and monitor QoS on Palo Alto firewall interfaces (both standalone & AE Aggregate interfaces), view QoS bandwidth graphs and more!
Key Topics:
- Introduction to Palo Alto QoS
- Palo Alto QoS Classes
- Palo Alto QoS Policies
- Configuring QoS Class-based Policies & Profiles
- Enabling QoS on Palo Alto Firewall Physical & Aggregate (AE) Interfaces
- Summary
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Introduction to Palo Alto QoS
QoS was born from the IEEE group during 1995-1998 by establishing the standard IEEE 802.1P. The main purpose of QoS is to prioritise desired traffic over other type of traffic or to limit the amount of bandwidth applications can consume, by utilizing different mechanisms. This ensures network performance, avoids bottlenecks, congestion or overutilization of network links. A frequently used example of QoS is the prioritising Real-time traffic e.g voice or video, over other type of traffic:
QoS Priority Queues - Packet classification and prioritization
In the example above, voice packets (blue) are given a higher priority against others, therefore immediately being forwarded by the firewall out via the output interface. Since voice packets are very sensitive to delay, they are usually handled with priority to avoid issues in a real-time voice streams e.g VoIP telephone call between two endpoints.