Citrix SD-WAN Orchestrator

Classes

Citrix SD-WAN Orchestrator service provides a default set of application and IP/Port based QoS policies that are applied to all traffic going over Virtual Paths. These settings can be customized to fit the deployment needs.

Classes are useful to prioritize the traffic. Application and IP/Port based QoS policies classify traffic and put it into appropriate classes specified in the configuration.

For more information on application based QoS policies and IP address based QoS policies, see QoS policies.

Citrix SD-WAN Orchestrator service supports 13 classes. The following are the default 13 classes:

[Virtual path default set]

The following are the different types of classes:

  • Real-time: Used for low latency, low bandwidth, time-sensitive traffic. Real-time applications are time sensitive but do not require high bandwidth (for example voice over IP). Real-time applications are sensitive to latency and jitter, but can tolerate some loss.

  • Interactive: Used for interactive traffic with low to medium latency requirements and low to medium bandwidth requirements. The interaction is typically between a client and a server. The communication might not need high bandwidth but is sensitive to loss and latency.

  • Bulk: Used for high bandwidth traffic and applications that can tolerate high latency. Applications that handle file transfer and need high bandwidth are categorized as bulk class. These applications involve little human interference and are mostly handled by the systems themselves.

Bandwidth sharing among classes

Bandwidth is shared among classes as follows:

  • Real-time: Traffic hitting real-time classes are guaranteed to have low latency and bandwidth is capped to the class share when there is competing traffic.

  • Interactive: Traffic hitting the interactive classes get remaining bandwidth after serving real-time traffic and the available bandwidth is fair shared among the interactive classes.

  • Bulk: Bulk is best effort. Bandwidth left over after serving real-time and interactive traffic is given to bulk classes on a fair share basis. Bulk traffic can starve if real-time and interactive traffic uses all the available bandwidth.

Note

Any class can use all available bandwidth when there is no contention.

The following example explains the bandwidth distribution based on the class configuration:

Consider there is an aggregated bandwidth of 10 Mbps over Virtual Path. If the class configuration is:

  • Real-time: 30%
  • Interactive High: 40%
  • Interactive Medium: 20%
  • Interactive Low: 10%
  • Bulk: 100%

The bandwidth distribution outcome is:

  • Real-time traffic gets 30% of 10Mbs (3 Mbps) based on the need. If it needs less than 10%, then the rest of the bandwidth is made available to the other classes.

  • Interactive classes share the remaining bandwidth on fair share basis (4 Mbps: 2 Mbps: 1 Mbps).

  • Anything leftover when real-time, interactive traffic is not fully using their shares is given to the Bulk class.

For information about customizing QoS classes, see QoS profiles.

Classes