More advanced QOS / Shaping Features

[Jeff_Roback]

Has anyone heard if there's any chance of more advanced traffic shaping/QoS features in the Fortigate at any point?  I'm very familiar with QoS on Cisco and Adtran platforms, and while I understand that the Fortigate isn't a router.... the Fortigate platform is still very limited in its traffic control capabilities, and even with all of the feature improvements over the years there hasn't been much in the way of QoS improvements in quite some time.

I've worked with the Fortigate shaping quite a bit, but it really doesn't seem like shaping so much as a series of priority queues with policing.    I was really hoping to get some more advanced congestion management functionality with Weighted Fair Queuing(WFQ), and congestion avoidance functionality such as Weighted Random Early Detect (WRED).

These would be helpful in scenarios where there is VPN and/or Citrix/VMware connectivity from smaller end sites using, for example the 90x Series fortigates to head end sites where we might be using the 100 or 200 series.   The bandwidth imbalances between the LAN and WAN at various sites do cause issues with performance that I'd like to address, but I'd really rather not have to stick a router in front of these devices.  So I'm hoping that Fortinet develops some additional functionality in this area.

Jeff

[kerya]

+1. Any info about WFQ and WRED higly appreciated.

[Adrian_Lewis]

+1 again. If we're renaming link load-balancing to SD-WAN, better QoS, shaping & congestion controls are going to be a requirement in many projects. I'd like to see hierarchical queuing as well but perhaps that's going too far.

[markdr_FTNT]

For anyone following this thread, please refer here:

https://docs.fortinet.com/document/fortigate/6.2.14/cookbook/261963/weighted-random-early-detection-...

This feature was introduced in FortiOS 6.2

Regards,
Mark

[Toshi_Esumi]

I think what OP asked has multipe aspects of QoS features. Weighted fair queuing(WFQ) as well as FIFO, FQ, Priority queueing(PQ), Weighted round robin(WRR), etc. are for queue scheduling method about how to dispatch packets to the egress from mulitple queues. FortiGate supports only PQ or they call it as strict.

On the other hand  Random early detection(RED), WRED and Head or Tail RED, etc. are packet dropping methods when each queue gets congested, which is addressed by the old cookbook Mark @markdr_FTNT points us to. I didn't know FGT supported them.

FortiSwitch covers both depending on the models.

Toshi