Summary
This design chapter primarily discussed the best-practice QoS design recommendations for the Cisco Catalyst 4500 (Supervisor 6-E/7-E) series switch in the role of a campus distribution layer switch. (which, incidentally are equivalent to the QoS designs required were it serving in the role of a campus core switch).
Because the Catalyst 4500 is an MQC-based QoS platform, QoS is enabled by default, as is DSCP trust, on all ports. Therefore, there is effectively only a single step to configuring QoS on a Catalyst 4500 performing the role of a distribution switch: to configure an egress queuing policy.
To this end, 4-class, 8-class, and 12-class queuing policies were detailed, along with corresponding configurations and verification examples, leveraging the Catalyst 4500’s flexible 1P7Q1T+DBL hardware queuing capabilities.
Additional platform-specific design options and considerations were discussed, including how the Catalyst 4500 could be deployed as an access-edge switch, and how to configure per-VLAN QoS, per-port/per-VLAN QoS, and EtherChannel QoS designs.
AutoQoS SRND4 is supported on the Catalyst 4500 and is covered in Appendix A; similarly, CPP is also supported and is covered in Appendix B.