Transparency and management IP for transparent bridge
2 posts · Closed
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, so we 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:
- When BM receives a packet on NIC 1, it checks the destination MAC address.
- 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.