Configuring rate limiting

This scenario illustrates how to use rate limiting to manage the traffic from various devices connected to a switch. The physical topology of the network looks like this:

A certain amount of broadcast traffic is necessary to maintain healthy network operation, particularly from routers and across service boundaries. In this scenario, both the service cloud and the router connections limit this traffic to 1 Gbps. The server has a smaller limit, as it does not require as much network protocol traffic as the service cloud and router.

A multicast server needs to be able to stream multicast traffic to clients, so a multicast rate limit may not be helpful. A computer, however, should not be generating large amounts of multicast traffic (it may be receiving streams, but typically not sending them). In this example, the computer is configured with a multicast rate limit to prevent malicious traffic from taking up network bandwidth.

Finally, while the service cloud and router may need to send traffic for unknown unicast addresses to resolve address forwarding, the server and computer should send very little of this type of traffic. Rate limiting unknown unicast traffic on those two devices enforces that.