Quality of Service (QoS)¶

Quality of service configuration in Zentyal¶

Zentyal is able to perform traffic shaping on the traffic flowing through the server, allowing a guaranteed or limited rate, or assigning a priority to certain types of data connections through the menu Traffic shaping ‣ Rules.

In order to perform traffic shaping, at least, an internal network interface and an external interface is required. In addition, you need, at least, one configured gateway. In Traffic Shaping ‣ Interface Rates you can set the upload and download rates that will be provided by the routers connected to your external interfaces. The shaping rules are specific for each interface and they may be selected for those external network interfaces with assigned upload rate - and for all internal interfaces.

If the external network interface is shaped, then you are limiting Zentyal output traffic to the Internet. If, however, you shape an internal network interface, then the Zentyal output to internal networks is limited. The maximum output and input rates are given by the configuration in Traffic Shaping ‣ Interface Rates. As you can see, shaping input traffic is not possible directly, because input traffic is not predictable nor controllable most of the time. There are specific techniques taken from various protocols used to handle the incoming traffic. TCP, by artificially adjusting the window size for the data flow in the TCP connection as well as controlling the rate of acknowledgements (ACK) segments being returned to the sender.

You can add rules for each network interface in order to give Priority (0: highest priority, 7: lowest priority), Guaranteed rate or Limited rate. These rules apply to traffic bound to a Service, a Source and/or a Destination of each connection.

Traffic shaping rules

Additionally, it’s possible to install the component Layer-7 Filter which allows us to configure a more complex analysis of the traffic shaping, based on identifying the last level protocols by their content rather than the port. As you can see when you install this component, you can use this filter by choosing Application based service or Application based service group as Service.

You can edit the groups of services or create new ones from Traffic Shaping ‣ Application Protocols.

The rules based on this type of filtering are more effective than the ones that just check the port, given that you may have servers configured to provide the service on non-default ports. This will be unnoticed if you do not analyze the traffic itself. It is expected that this type of analysis usually means a heavier processing load for the Zentyal server.