DMVPN Per-Tunnel QoS

In a DMVPN network it’s likely that your spoke routers are connected using a variety of connections. You might be using DSL, cable or wireless connections on different sites.

With all these different connections, it’s not feasible to use a single QoS policy and apply it to all spoke routers. You also don’t want to create a unique QoS policy for each router if you have hundreds of spoke routers.

Per-Tunnel QoS allows us to create different QoS policies and we can apply them to different NHRP “groups”. Multiple spoke routers can be assigned to the same group but each router will be individually measured.

For example, let’s say we have 300 spoke routers:

• 100 spoke routers connected through DSL (1 Mbps).
• 100 spoke routers connected through Cable (5 Mbps).
• 100 spoke routers connected through Wireless (2 Mbps).

In this case we can create three QoS policies, one for DSL, cable and wireless. In each QoS policy we will configure the correct shaping rate so our spoke routers don’t get overburdened with traffic. When we apply one of the QoS policies, traffic to each spoke router will be shaped to the correct rate.

Let’s take a look at the configuration so you can see how this works…

Configuration

To demonstrate DMVPN Per-Tunnel QoS I will use the following topology:

Above we have a hub and four spoke routers. Let’s imagine that the spoke1 and spoke2 routers are connected using a 5 Mbps link, the spoke3 and spoke4 routers are using a slower 1 Mbps link.

Our DMVPN network is used for VoIP traffic so our QoS policy should have a priority queue for RTP traffic.

We use subnet 192.168.123.0/24 as the “underlay” network and 172.16.123.0/24 as the “overlay” (tunnel) network.

The DMVPN network is used for VoIP traffic

Let’s start with a basic DMVPN phase 2 configuration. Here’s the configuration of the hub router:

Hub#
interface Tunnel0
 ip address 172.16.123.1 255.255.255.0
 ip nhrp authentication DMVPN
 ip nhrp map multicast dynamic
 ip nhrp network-id 1
 tunnel source GigabitEthernet0/1
 tunnel mode gre multipointend

And here’s the configuration of one spoke router:

Spoke1#
interface Tunnel0
 ip address 172.16.123.2 255.255.255.0
 ip nhrp authentication DMVPN
 ip nhrp map 172.16.123.1 192.168.123.1
 ip nhrp map multicast 192.168.123.1
 ip nhrp network-id 1
 ip nhrp nhs 172.16.123.1
 tunnel source GigabitEthernet0/1
 tunnel mode gre multipointend

The configuration above is the same on all spoke routers except for the IP address.

Let’s start with the hub configuration…

Hub Configuration

Let’s create a class-map and policy-map that gives priority to VoIP traffic:

Hub(config)#class-map VOIP
Hub(config-cmap)#match protocol rtp

I’ll use NBAR to identify our RTP traffic. Here’s the policy-map:

Hub(config)#policy-map PRIORITY      
Hub(config-pmap)#class VOIP
Hub(config-pmap-c)#priority percent 20

In the policy-map we will create a priority queue for 20 percent of the interface bandwidth. Instead of applying this policy-map to an interface, we’ll create two more policy-maps. The first one will be for our spoke routers that are connected through the 1 Mbps connections:

Hub(config)#policy-map SHAPE_1M
Hub(config-pmap)#class class-default
Hub(config-pmap-c)#shape average 1m
Hub(config-pmap-c)#service-policy PRIORITY

In the policy-map above called “SHAPE_1M” we shape all traffic in the class-default class-map to 1 Mbps. Within the shaper, we apply the policy map that creates a priority queue for 20% of the bandwidth. 20% of 1 Mbps is 200 kbps.

Let’s create the second policy-map for our spoke routers that are connected through a 5 Mbps connection:

Hub(config)#policy-map SHAPE_5M
Hub(config-pmap)#class class-default
Hub(config-pmap-c)#shape average 5M
Hub(config-pmap-c)#service-policy PRIORITY

The policy-map is the same except that it will shape up to 5 Mbps. The priority queue will get 20% of 5 Mbps which is 1 Mbps.

We have our policy-maps but we still have to apply them somehow. We don’t apply them to an interface but we will map them to NHRP groups:

Hub(config)#interface Tunnel 0
Hub(config-if)#nhrp ?
  attribute        NHRP attribute
  event-publisher  Enable NHRP smart spoke feature
  group            NHRP group name
  map              Map group name to QoS service policy
  route-watch      Enable NHRP route watch

On the tunnel interface we can use the nhrp map command. Take a look below:

Hub(config-if)#nhrp map ?     
  group  NHRP group mapping

Let’s use the group parameter:

Hub(config-if)#nhrp map group ?
  WORD  NHRP group name

Now you can specify a NHRP group name. You can use any name but to keep it simple, it’s best to use the same name as the policy-maps that we created earlier:

Hub(config-if)#nhrp map group SHAPE_1M ?
  service-policy  QoS service-policy

The only thing left to do is to attach the NHRP group to the policy-map: