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To pass the CCNP exams, you’ve got to master Quality of Service, and the first step in doing so is knowing the differences between the different QoS types.

Now this being Cisco, we can’t just have one kind of QoS! We’ve got best-effort delivery, Integrated Services, and Differentiated Services. Let’s take a quick look at all three.

Best-effort is just what it sounds like – routers and switches making their “best effort” to deliver data. This is considered QoS, but it’s kind of a “default QoS”. Best effort is strictly “first in, first out” (FIFO).

An entire path from Point A to Point B will be defined in advance when Integrated Services are in effect. Integrated Services is much like the High-Occupancy Vehicle lanes found in many larger cities. If your car has three or more people in it, you’re considered a “priority vehicle” and you can drive in a special lane with much less congestion than regular lanes. Integrated Services will create this lane in advance for “priority traffic”, and when that traffic comes along, the path already exists. Integrated Services uses the Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) to create these paths. RSVP guarantees a quality rate of service, since this “priority path” is created in advance.

Integrated Services is defined in RFC 1613. Use your favorite search engine to locate a copy online and read more about this topic. It’s a good idea to get into the habit of reading RFCs!

Of course, if you’ve got a lot of different dedicated paths being created that may or not be used very often, that’s a lot of wasted bandwidth. That leads us to the third QoS model, the Differentiated Services model. Generally referred to as DiffServ, there are no advance path reservations and there’s no RSVP. The QoS policies are written on the routers and switches, and they take action dynamically as needed. Since each router and switch can have a different QoS policy, DiffServ takes effect on a per-hop basis rather than the per-flow basis of Integrated Services. A packet can be considered “high priority” by one router and “normal priority” by the next.

Believe me, this is just the beginning when it comes to Quality of Service. It’s a huge topic on your exams and in the real world’s production networks, and as with all other Cisco topics, just master the fundamentals and build from there – and you’re on your way to CCNP exam success!

When you’re working on your BCMSN exam on your way to CCNP certification, you’ll read at length about how Cisco routers and multilayer switches can work to provide router redundancy – but there’s another helpful service, Server Load Balancing, that does the same for servers. While HSRP, VRRP, and CLBP all represent multiple physical routers to hosts as a single virtual router, SLB represents multiple physical servers to hosts as a single virtual server.

In the following example, three physical servers have been placed into the SRB group ServFarm. They’re represented to the hosts as the virtual server 210.1.1.14.

The hosts will seek to communicate with the server at 210.1.1.14, not knowing that they’re actually communicating with the routers in ServFarm. This allows quick cutover if one of the physical servers goes down, and also serves to hide the actual IP addresses of the servers in ServFarm.

The basic operations of SLB involves creating the server farm, followed by creating the virtual server. We’ll first add 210.1.1.11 to the server farm:

MLS(config)# ip slb serverfarm ServFarm

MLS(config-slb-sfarm)# real 210.1.1.11

MLS(config-slb-real)# inservice

The first command creates the server farm, with the real command specifying the IP address of the real server. The inservice command is required by SLB to consider the server as ready to handle the server farm’s workload. The real and inservice commands should be repeated for each server in the server farm.

To create the virtual server:

MLS(config)# ip slb vserver VIRTUAL_SERVER

MLS(config-slb-vserver)# serverfarm ServFarm

MLS(config-slb-vserver)# virtual 210.1.1.14

MLS(config-slb-vserver)# inservice

From the top down, the vserver was named VIRTUAL_SERVER, which represents the server farm ServFarm. The virtual server is assigned the IP address 210.1.1.14, and connections are allowed once the inservice command is applied.

You may also want to control which of your network hosts can connect to the virtual server. If hosts or subnets are named with the client command, those will be the only clients that can connect to the virtual server. Note that this command uses wildcard masks. The following configuration would allow only the hosts on the subnet 210.1.1.0 /24 to connect to the virtual server.

MLS(config-slb-vserver)# client 210.1.1.0 0.0.0.255

SLB is the server end’s answer to HSRP, VRRP, and GLBP – but you still need to know it to become a CCNP! Knowing redundancy strategies and protocols is vital in today’s networks, so make sure you’re comfortable with SLB before taking on the exam.

To earn your CCNP certification and pass the BCMSN exam, you’ve got to know what HSRP does and the many configurable options. While the operation of HSRP is quite simple (and covered in a previous tutorial), you also need to know how HSRP arrives at the MAC address for the virtual router – as well as how to configure a new MAC for this virtual router. This puts us in the unusual position of creating a physical address for a router that doesn’t exist!

The output of show standby for a two-router HSRP configuration is shown below.

R2#show standby

Ethernet0 – Group 5

Local state is Standby, priority 100

Hellotime 3 sec, holdtime 10 sec

Next hello sent in 0.776

Virtual IP address is 172.12.23.10 configured

Active router is 172.12.23.3, priority 100 expires in 9.568

Standby router is local

1 state changes, last state change 00:00:22

R3#show standby

Ethernet0 – Group 5

Local state is Active, priority 100

Hellotime 3 sec, holdtime 10 sec

Next hello sent in 2.592

Virtual IP address is 172.12.23.10 configured

Active router is local

Standby router is 172.12.23.2 expires in 8.020

Virtual mac address is 0000.0c07.ac05

2 state changes, last state change 00:02:08

R3 is in Active state, while R2 is in Standby. The hosts are using the 172.12.123.10 address as their gateway, but R3 is actually handling the workload. R2 will take over if R3 becomes unavailable.

An IP address was assigned to the virtual router during the HSRP configuration process, but not a MAC address. However, there is a MAC address under the show standby output on R3, the active router. How did the HSRP process arrive at a MAC of 00-00-0c-07-ac-05?

Well, most of the work is already done before the configuration is even begun. The MAC address 00-00-0c-07-ac-xx is reserved for HSRP, and xx is the group number in hexadecimal. That’s a good skill to have for the exam, so make sure you’re comfortable with hex conversions. The group number is 5, which is expressed as 05 with a two-bit hex character. If the group number had been 17, we’d see 11 at the end of the MAC address – one unit of 16, one unit of 1.

The output of the show standby command also tells us that the HSRP speakers are sending Hellos every 3 seconds, with a 10-second holdtime. These values can be changed with the standby command, but HSRP speakers in the same group should have the same timers. You can even tie down the hello time to the millisecond, but it’s doubtful you’ll ever need to do that.

R3(config-if)#standby 5 timers ?

Hello interval in seconds

msec Specify hello interval in milliseconds

R3(config-if)#standby 5 timers 4 ?

Hold time in seconds

R3(config-if)#standby 5 timers 4 12

Another important HSRP skill is knowing how to change the Active router assignment. I’ll show you how to do that, and how to configure HSRP interface tracking, in the next part of my CCNP / BCMSN exam tutorial!