Overview… transmission rate
The most important parameter for a stream’s transmission profile is the rate, which specifies how much of the bandwidth available for the port is consumed by the stream.
The rate can be specified in three different ways:
- Percent, which is the fraction of the underlying bandwidth consumed, including the bandwidth used for the minimum inter packet gap required between packets.
- Packets per second, where the amount of bandwidth consumed depends largely on the average length of the packets defined for the stream.
- Mega-bits per second, which is the amount of bits transmitted at layer-2, hence excluding the bandwidth used for inter packet gaps.
This picture shows some rates for a stream of 80-byte packets with an inter packet gap of 20 bytes on a 10 Gbps port:
Whenever you specify a rate using one of these methods that rate becomes the primary rate. The corresponding rates for the two other methods are called derived rates.
In the XenaManager the primary rate is shown with the normal blue color, and the derived rates are shown with gray text color. You can still edit one of the derived rates, which then becomes the new primary rate.
The XenaManager automatically calculates derived rates. This also takes into account the packet length defined for the stream, and indeed if you change the packet length the derived rates will be re-calculated.