Administrator Guide

Specifically:
● Available CAM — the available number of CAM entries in the specified CAM partition for the specified line card or
stack-unit port-pipe.
● Estimated CAM — the estimated number of CAM entries that the policy will consume when it is applied to an interface.
● Status — indicates whether the specified policy-map can be completely applied to an interface in the port-pipe.
○ Allowed — indicates that the policy-map can be applied because the estimated number of CAM entries is less or equal
to the available number of CAM entries. The number of interfaces in the port-pipe to which the policy-map can be
applied is given in parentheses.
○ Exception — indicates that the number of CAM entries required to write the policy-map to the CAM is greater than
the number of available CAM entries, and therefore the policy-map cannot be applied to an interface in the specified
port-pipe.
NOTE: The show cam-usage command provides much of the same information as the test cam-usage command,
but whether a policy-map can be successfully applied to an interface cannot be determined without first measuring how
many CAM entries the policy-map would consume; the test cam-usage command is useful because it provides this
measurement.
● Verify that there are enough available CAM entries.
test cam-usage
Dell# test cam-usage service-policy input pmap_l2 port-set 0
Port-pipe | CAM Partition | Available CAM | Estimated CAM | Status
=====================================================================
0 L2ACL 500 200 Allowed(2)
Configuring Weights and ECN for WRED
The feature to configure a weight for WRED and ECN functionality for backplane ports is supported on the Z9000 platform.
The WRED congestion avoidance functionality drops packets to prevent buffering resources from being consumed. Traffic is a
mixture of various kinds of packets. The rate at which some types of packets arrive might be greater than others. In this case,
the space on the buffer and traffic manager (BTM) (ingress or egress) can be consumed by only one or few types of traffic,
leaving no space for other types. You can apply a WRED profile to a policy-map so that the specified traffic can be prevented
from consuming too much of the BTM resources.
WRED drops packets when the average queue length exceeds the configured threshold value to signify congestion. ECN is a
capability that enhances WRED by marking the packets instead of causing WRED to drop them when the threshold value is
exceeded. If you configure ECN for WRED, devices employ ECN to mark the packets and reduce the rate of sending packets in
a congested network.
In a best-effort network topology, data packets are transmitted in a manner in which latency or throughput is not maintained
to be at an effective level. Packets are dropped when the network experiences a large traffic load. This best-effort network
deployment is not suitable for applications that are time-sensitive, such as video on demand (VoD) or voice over IP (VoIP)
applications. In such cases, you can use ECN in conjunction with WRED to resolve the dropping of packets under congested
conditions.
Using ECN, the packets are marked for transmission at a later time after the network recovers from the heavy traffic state
to an optimal load. In this manner, enhanced performance and throughput are achieved. Also, the devices can respond to
congestion before a queue overflows and packets are dropped, enabling improved queue management.
When a packet reaches the device with ECN enabled for WRED, the average queue size is computed. To measure the average
queue size, a weight factor is used. This weight factor is user-configurable. You can use the wred weight number command
to configure the weight for the WRED average queue size. The mark probability value is the number of packets dropped when
the average queue size reaches the maximum threshold value.
The weight factor is set to zero by default, which causes the same behavior as dropping of packets by WRED during network
loads or also called instantaneous ECN marking. In a topology in which congestion of the network varies over time, you can
specify a weight to enable a smooth, seamless averaging of packets to handle the sudden overload of packets based on the
previous time sampling performed. You can specify the weight parameter for front-end and backplane ports separately in the
range of 0 through 15.
You can enable WRED and ECN capabilities per queue for granularity. You can disable these functionality per queue, and you
can also specify the minimum and maximum buffer thresholds for each color-coding of the packets. You can configure maximum
drop rate percentage of yellow and green profiles. You can set up these parameters for both front-end and backplane ports.
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Quality of Service (QoS)