R82 QoS Administration Guide

Introduction to QoS

The Check Point QoS Solution

QoS is a policy based bandwidth management solution that lets you:

• Prioritize business-critical traffic, such as ERP, database and Web services traffic, over lower priority traffic.
• Guarantee bandwidth and control latency for streaming applications, such as Voice over IP (VoIP) and video conferencing.
• Give guaranteed or priority access to specified employees, even if they are remotely accessing network resources.

You deploy QoS with the Security Gateway.

QoS is enabled for both encrypted and unencrypted traffic.

QoS leverages the industry's most advanced traffic inspection and bandwidth control technologies. Check Point patented Stateful Inspection technology captures and dynamically updates detailed state information on all network traffic. This state information is used to classify traffic by service or application. After traffic has been classified, QoS applies an innovative, hierarchical, Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ) algorithm to accurately control bandwidth allocation.

Features and Benefits

QoS gives these features and benefits:

• Flexible QoS policies with weights, limits and guarantees
• Integration with the Security Gateway
• Performance analysis
• Integrated DiffServ support
• Integrated Low Latency Queuing
• No need to deploy separate VPN, Firewall and QoS devices
• Proactive management of network costs
• Support for end-to-end QoS for IP networks
• CoreXL and SecureXL support
• VSX Support

QoS Policy Types

This release includes two QoS Policy types:

• Express - Quickly create basic QoS Policies
• Recommended - Create advanced Policies with the full set of QoS features

This table shows the difference between the Recommended and Express policy types.

To select a QoS Policy type:

1. In SmartConsole menu, click Manage policies and layers.
2. In the Manage Policies window, click New or select an existing Policy and then click Edit.
3. Select QoS, and then select Recommended or Express.

Workflow

This topic shows a high-level workflow for creating an effective QoS Policy.

Do these steps in SmartConsole:

1. Enable QoS for each applicable Security Gateway.
2. Configure QoS Global Properties.
3. Create or change a QoS Policy.
4. Configure log collection and system monitoring for QoS.
5. Publish the SmartConsole session.

Do these steps in SmartDashboard:

1. Define the gateway networks, services and other related objects.
2. Define QoS rules (basic and advanced).
3. Configure specialized QoS features.
   1. Differentiated Services (DiffServ).
   2. Low Latency Queuing.

Go back to SmartConsole to do these steps:

1. Publish the SmartConsole session.
2. Install Policy.

Limitations

These limitations apply to Scalable Platforms:

• QoS is not supported when a Security Group is configured in the Layer 4 distribution mode.
• QoS policy is applied on each Security Group Member.