Citrix SD-WAN WANOP

Traffic shaping

What is Citrix SD-WAN WANOP Traffic Shaping?

Citrix SD-WAN WANOP traffic shaping uses a group of policies to set the priority of different link traffic and send traffic onto the link at a rate close to, but no greater than, the link speed. Unlike acceleration, which applies only to TCP/IP traffic, the traffic shaper handles all traffic on the link.

What is the benefit of traffic shaping?

Traffic shaping uses scarce link resources according to the policies you set, so that traffic that is known to be important will receive more bandwidth than traffic that is known to be unimportant.

How does the traffic shaper interact with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops traffic?

The Citrix SD-WAN WANOP device parses the Virtual Apps/Virtual Desktops data stream and is aware of the different types of traffic and its priorities, favoring high-priority traffic. It is the only product that can prioritize encrypted ICA streams and provide native support for MultiStream ICA, which divides a user’s session into up to four connections with different priorities.

What is weighted fair queuing?

A Citrix SD-WAN WANOP appliance uses weighted fair queuing, which provides a separate queue for each connection. With fair queuing, a too-fast connection can overflow only its own queue. It has no effect on other connections.

What is the difference between weighted and non-weighted fair queuing?

Weighted fair queuing includes the option of giving some traffic a higher priority (weight) than others. Traffic with a weight of two receives twice the bandwidth of traffic with a weight of one. In a Citrix SD-WAN WANOP configuration, the weights are assigned in traffic-shaping policies.

What is a link definition?

A link definition specifies which traffic is associated with the defined link, the maximum bandwidth to allow for traffic received on the link, and the maximum bandwidth for traffic sent over the link. The definition also identifies traffic as inbound or outbound and as WAN-side or LAN-side traffic.

What are the benefits for link definition?

Link definitions enable the appliance to prevent congestion and loss on your WAN links and to perform traffic shaping. The definition also identifies traffic as inbound or outbound and as WAN-side or LAN-side traffic. All traffic flowing through the appliance is compared to your list of link definitions, and the first matching definition identifies the link to which the traffic belongs.

I have not configured any service class with Default Policy. However, the traffic shaping reports displays a large amount of traffic represented by Default Policy. Have I configured something incorrectly?

No. There is no issue with your configuration. Traffic shaping is only applicable to the WAN link. Traffic on the LAN or any other link is represented by Default Policy.

For example, consider a configuration where you create a service class, such as Management_Service_Class, that has the management subnet as the destination IP address and you bind a custom traffic shaping policy to this service class. In this case, when there is no traffic on WAN, you can notice that the management traffic is classified as Management_Service_Class in the service class report. However, in the Traffic Shaping Policy report, entries for Default Policy still exist that you might expect to exist as custom traffic shaping policy.

In the Traffic Shaping Policy report, the appliance does not use customized traffic shaping policy for the Management_Service_Class policy and applies Default Policy. To avoid this confusion, you can clear the All other option or define the LAN type link for the management interface.

Traffic shaping