Windows Server Quality of Service

Quality of Service (QoS) is a generic term that covers a large number of ways to shape network traffic. The general aim of QoS is to prioritize specific classes or services. Usually, this means ensuring that one or more traffic types have a minimum amount of bandwidth, but it can also mean suspending other traffic types to ensure the lowest possible latency for a given data stream. Voice over IP (VoIP) is a very common application for QoS because it is highly intolerant of network latency.

The Windows operating system has offered policy-based QoS for some time. New in Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V Server 2012 is the ability to set QoS within the context of the virtual switch. Another new introduction is Data Center Bridging, in which the physical switching hardware does most of the QoS work.

Policy-based QoS

Policy-based QoS is a Windows Server technology designed to handle all traffic types. The new PowerShell cmdlets used to configure policy-based QoS are...