Differentiated Services Commands

This section describes the commands used to configure QOS Differentiated Services (DiffServ).

You configure DiffServ in several stages by specifying three DiffServ components:

1. Class
   1. Creating and deleting classes.
   2. Defining match criteria for a class.
2. Policy
   1. Creating and deleting policies
   2. Associating classes with a policy
   3. Defining policy statements for a policy/class combination
3. Service
   1. Adding and removing a policy to/from an inbound interface

The DiffServ class defines the packet filtering criteria. The attributes of a DiffServ policy define the way the switch processes packets. You can define policy attributes on a per-class instance basis. The switch applies these attributes when a match occurs.

Packet processing begins when the switch tests the match criteria for a packet. The switch applies a policy to a packet when it finds a class match within that policy.

The following rules apply when you create a DiffServ class:

• Each class can contain a maximum of one referenced (nested) class
• Class definitions do not support hierarchical service policies

A given class definition can contain a maximum of one reference to another class. You can combine the reference with other match criteria. The referenced class is truly a reference and not a copy since additions to a referenced class affect all classes that reference it. Changes to any class definition currently referenced by any other class must result in valid class definitions for all derived classes, otherwise the switch rejects the change. You can remove a class reference from a class definition.

The only way to remove an individual match criterion from an existing class definition is to delete the class and re-create it.

Note

The mark possibilities for policing include CoS (Class of Service), IP DSCP, and IP Precedence. While the latter two are only meaningful for IP packet types, CoS marking is allowed for both IP and non-IP packets, since it updates the 802.1p user priority field contained in the VLAN tag of the layer 2 packet header.