Network Planning

[DanielBHSNIT]

I've been in IT for 22 years but I'm still illiterate it seems when it comes to optimal planning and configuration.

My sites usually are composed of an MX64 or MX68 depending on size; connected to MS120-48FP's or MS210-48LP's and on top of that we have some flavor of MR access points.

If you were going to configure this to ensure that you maximize the bandwidth you get at each site; what settings should I look at adjusting for each piece?

The catalyst (no pun intended) behind this is we want to order more bandwidth at some of our sites; sometimes during the day things get really slow, but we have a lot of people doing teams conferences, etc.

[DarrenOC]

Hi @DanielBHSNIT 

Look for the bottlenecks in your network.  What's the utilization like of your uplinks, are these getting saturated?  

[DanielBHSNIT]

They aren't saturated all the time; a few hours a day tops. At our largest location the bandwidth is 400x400.  At our smallest location it is 100x100.

[RaphaelL]

Properly configure your trafic shaping according to your WAN speeds. Throttle useless trafic ( updates , P2P ) 

[DanielBHSNIT]

I've set uplink configurations to maximum for each appliance because the ISP does offer speed burst on them.  Should I adjust those and if I should, should I adjust them to be 100 megs more than the contracted speed?

As for throttling useless traffic, I have these default traffic shaping rules set at the firewall, but I think that isn't the only place where I'm supposed to configure things...