topic Re: QoS: why is it capped at 1 Gbps? in General Topics

QoS: why is it capped at 1 Gbps?

fjwcash — Wed, 15 Nov 2017 23:37:46 GMT

Is it a physical limitation, or a software limitation?

The PA-3020 has gigabit ports, which can be combined into aggregate interfaces that support multi-gigabit combined throughput. However, it you enable QoS on an aggregate interface, no matter how many interfaces are in that group, you are limited to 1 Gbps throughput.

Shouldn't you be able to set a QoS Egress Max to whatever the total throughput of the aggregate interface is?

We're running PanOS 7.1.10 on this device. We have a 2 Gbps connection to the Internet, so we're using an aggregate interface across two physical ports. We're using QoS profiles to prioritise traffic (SIP/RTP goes into groups 2 and 1 respectively, everything else into group 4), not to limit bandwidth in any way ... and we just discovered we've been capping our Internet traffic at 1 Gbps!!

We've removed the QoS profile from our two aggregate interfaces, so we'll see tomorrow if this allows us to use more than the 1 Gbps we've been using. But we're wondering why the arbitrary 1 Gbps limit on a system that allows for aggregate interfaces.

Cheers,

Freddie

Re: QoS: why is it capped at 1 Gbps?

reaper — Thu, 16 Nov 2017 09:35:02 GMT

There's good news: if you upgrade to PAN-OS 8.0.4 or higher, or 7.1.11 or higher, that limitation is removed

Re: QoS: why is it capped at 1 Gbps?

fjwcash — Thu, 16 Nov 2017 16:49:51 GMT

Of course, one revision higher than we're recommended to be running. 🙂 This is good information to have for the future.

In the meantime, we've discovered some changes/reconfigurations we can make to our network to move the 2 Gbps links off the PA-3020 and onto a pure routing device, so the 1 Gbps limitation won't be an issue. And it simplifies other things as well.

For now, we'll run without QoS on the aggregate interfaces and monitor things. If it becomes an issue, then we have a couple different ways to move forward.

Thanks for the info!