Setting up a transparent bridge

Hi there, we are just in the process of looking at options for some sites we look after who currently have bandwidth shaping in place with a dedicated appliance.

At the heart of the network there is an L3 switch which handles all inter-VLAN routing and then routes anything else to the firewalls which then connect to the ISP. We have around 60-80 subnets and would like to be able to shape on those either individually or grouped together. Below I've attached a very quick diagram of the topology. In this instance, would Bandwidth Manager be completely transparent to the internal subnets, assuming traffic was flowing through FW1?

Also, due to these being a transparent bridge, would the NIC facing the core switch have an IP address in the 10.0.0.X range purely for management? The current appliance has an out-of-band port for management, we so wanted to double check.

It is hard to tell how it will work in your network with multiple VLANs. The bridging simply switches two NICs to promiscuous mode and follows this procedure:

1. When BM receives a packet on NIC 1, it checks the destination MAC address.
2. If the MAC address belongs to NIC 1, the packet is forwarded to the stack.
   If it does not, the packet is transmitted unchanged via NIC 2.

A similar thing happens when a packet arrives at NIC 2: it's forwarded through NIC 1.

BM doesn't really care which IP addresses are assigned to the NICs, so yes, you can have a specific IP address for management.

All that said, we strongly recommend downloading and testing a trial copy of Bandwidth Manager before purchasing a licence, to make sure it works and performs well in your circumstances and with your actual bandwidth.