Quality of Service
QoS Features and Components
491 Cisco Small Business 200, 300 and 500 Series Managed Switch Administration Guide (Internal Version) 
25
QoS Modes
The QoS mode that is selected applies to all interfaces in the system.
• Basic Mode—Class of Service (CoS).
All traffic of the same class receives the same treatment, which is the single 
QoS action of determining the egress queue on the egress port, based on 
the indicated QoS value in the incoming frame. This can be the VLAN 
Priority Tag (VPT) 802.1p value in Layer 2 and the Differentiated Service 
Code Point (DSCP) value for IPv4 or Traffic Class (TC) value for IPv6 in 
Layer 3. When operating in Basic Mode, the device trusts this external 
assigned QoS value. The external assigned QoS value of a packet 
determines its traffic class and QoS. 
The header field to be trusted is entered in the Global Settings page. For 
every value of that field, an egress queue is assigned where the frame is 
sent in the CoS/802.1p to Queue page or the DSCP to Queue page 
(depending on whether the trust mode is CoS/802.1p or DSCP, 
respectively).
• Advanced Mode—Per-flow Quality of Service (QoS).
In advanced mode, a per flow QoS consists of a class map and/or a policer:
- A class map defines the kind of traffic in a flow, and contains one or more 
ACLs. Packets that match the ACLs belong to the flow. 
- A policer applies the configured QoS to a flow. The QoS configuration of 
a flow may consist of egress queue, the DSCP or CoS/802.1p value, and 
actions on out of profile (excess) traffic.
• Disable Mode—In this mode all traffic is mapped to a single best effort 
queue, so that no type of traffic is prioritized over another.
Only a single mode can be active at a time. When the system is configured to work 
in QoS Advanced mode, settings for QoS Basic mode are not active and vice 
versa.
When the mode is changed, the following occurs:
• When changing from QoS Advanced mode to any other mode, policy profile 
definitions and class maps are deleted. ACLs bonded directly to interfaces 
remain bonded.
• When changing from QoS Basic mode to Advanced mode, the QoS Trust 
mode configuration in Basic mode is not retained.