Product Structure

Solaris Bandwidth Manager contains the following major components:

• The administration tool, batool, provides a graphical interface for configuring bandwidth management. This can be run as an applet or an application from any machine in your network that has a Java Virtual Machine. It also allows you to create a bandwidth management schedule, and view statistics.

• The policy agent implements the configuration and handles communication with the kernel module. See "The Policy Agent" for details of how the policy agent works.

• The kernel module is viewed as a STREAMS driver, /dev/ipqos, by the tools in user space, and is viewed as a STREAMS module, ipqos, by the IP stack. It contains the classifier and the scheduler.

  • The classifier allocates packets to a class queue.

  • The scheduler determines the order in which queued packets are forwarded across the network, and applies the bandwidth limits and priorities configured for each type of traffic.

• A set of Java APIs allow you to write applications to configure Solaris Bandwidth Manager, use a directory service with Solaris Bandwidth Manager and gather statistics. There is also a C Statistics API.

• In addition to the statistics gathering capabilities of batool, the statistics utility, bastat, displays statistics on the bandwidth management configuration in use.

• The SNMP agent enables you to monitor Solaris Bandwidth Manager using any SNMP management utility, such as Solstice(TM) Site Manager(TM) or Solstice Domain Manager(TM). This is a component of the policy agent.

• Commands and utilities for managing the Solaris Bandwidth Manager software and monitoring your network

The diagram below shows the architecture of Solaris Bandwidth Manager.

Figure 2-1 Solaris Bandwidth Manager Architecture

Administration Tool

You can use the administration tool, batool, to configure Solaris Bandwidth Manager. It has two modes:

• In on-line mode, you can change the configuration currently being used by the kernel module. This is useful if an immediate temporary change is required because of a problem in your network. You also have the option of saving the current configuration, so that your changes are preserved. On-line mode allows you to observe the consequences of a particular configuration before you save it.

• In off-line mode, you can change a configuration without disturbing the current behavior of the kernel module. This is useful if you want to make changes in the configuration without disrupting users, and have them implemented the next time the product is restarted.

The administration tool communicates with the kernel module through the policy agent. batool sends configuration changes to the kernel module, and the kernel module sends statistics to batool.

See Chapter 5, Configuring Solaris Bandwidth Manager Using batool for a more detailed description of batool and how to use it. You can also configure Solaris Bandwidth Manager by editing the configuration files, or from a directory service.

The Policy Agent

The policy agent is the communications hub of Solaris Bandwidth Manager. It controls the information sent to and from all other components, and the policies that they operate. It is implemented using the Java Dynamic Management^TM Kit framework. It contains a set of Java management beans (m-beans) and their exported interfaces. See Appendix A, Policy Agent Architecture for more detail on the architecture of the policy agent.