WAAS Resources?

redwarrior

Ok, so this might not specifically fall under the scope of CCNP material, but I was wondering if any of you out there support enterprise scale Cisco WAAS deployments and, if so, what kinds of resources do you use? I'm working on a project involving our first deployment of WAAS on our network and I'd like to do it right the first time rather than kind of toss it in and then have it become a mess when we start to expand it and then need to clean it up.

Thanks in advance!

gojericho0

I did a deployment about a year ago. I just used Cisco's WAAS Installation and Configuration Guides and they were quite helpful

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6870/products_installation_and_configuration_guides_list.html

astorrs

WAAS is a nightmare when not planned out (not sure how large your network is so this may or may not be true in your case). Take the time to do your due diligence and testing prior to production deployment across all your sites.

If your WAN is extremely complex and after a few months you still can't make it work properly (even after working directly with Cisco) give Riverbed a call. Everyone else does.

mikearama

We installed a pair of 500's earlier this year... plus one for management. Our mpls network connects us to 10 remote sites, all of which come back to us for file storage, email, and internet. One of the sites (Vancouver) could not get acceptable round-trip reponse times which affected their apps, as well as general user impression.

The WAAS implementation is just between us (Toronto) and Vancouver. The results have been favourable, though less than I'd hoped. I expected to be wow'd. Guess I kinda got over-sold on the benefits of having the devices.

Let us know if you have any specific questions.

Mike

mikej412

You can check the Cisco Design Zone.

The Solution Reference Network Design Design Guides page is also a good link to check out (and no, I didn't stutter -- Design is there twice )..


Enterprise Data Center Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) Design Guide

Enterprise Branch Wide Area Application Services Design Guide v.1.1


Remember the old sayings:
Design twice, Implement/Configure once.
If you don't know what you're building, how will you know when you're done?

astorrs

mikearama wrote:

The results have been favourable, though less than I'd hoped. I expected to be wow'd. Guess I kinda got over-sold on the benefits of having the devices.

This is a fairly common complaint I hear with WAAS.

redwarrior, if you're not already sold on Cisco's solution, do yourself a favor and consider the other more mature players in the Advanced WAN Optimization space.

Pretty much everyone will let you demo their product on your network for 30-90 days at no charge. Do a comparison and see what works best for your network.

You should also check out Gartner's "Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization Controllers, 2007" for a good write up on the market. You can get to it for free by following the link at the bottom of this page.

redwarrior

Heh...I wish I had that kind of pull! Basicallly, I had 3 WAAS devices (1 to be the central manager) handed to me when I started here with a mandate to make them work. These will be the test and depending on the results, they may deploy them all over or not. I have heard a lot about riverbed, but since we've already bought this gear, it's pretty much out of my hands.

I'll read over all this info and I'm also getting them to buy me the Cisco Press book on these things. We do have a pretty complex WAN configuration. The particular site they'd like to test these with is on a point-to-multipoint frame-relay connection, so I'm particularly concerned about how best to handle making sure just the traffic from the 1 site I'm testing this on gets sent through. I've looked at WLCCP as an option, but the routing guys would like to put in inline and use OSPF to handle any failure. Yet another time I wish I was about 6 months further along in my studies.

redwarrior

I think the design guides are what I'm most interested in at this point...I've learned the hard way how you think you're just deploying a couple of devices (say, wireless access points) for a test and next thing you know they think you have an entire, scalable solution in place. (Say, a VoIP-ready seamless wireless network with roaming?) LOL! This time, I'd like to be a step ahead if I can.

Netstudent

mikearama wrote:

We installed a pair of 500's earlier this year... plus one for management. Our mpls network connects us to 10 remote sites, all of which come back to us for file storage, email, and internet. One of the sites (Vancouver) could not get acceptable round-trip reponse times which affected their apps, as well as general user impression.

The WAAS implementation is just between us (Toronto) and Vancouver. The results have been favourable, though less than I'd hoped. I expected to be wow'd. Guess I kinda got over-sold on the benefits of having the devices.

Let us know if you have any specific questions.

Mike

If you want to be wowed, sell your WAAS and buy Riverbed. I evaluated both with extensive pilot testing in production and Riverbed by far is the superior product. Especially if you are trying to accelerate SSL apps. But the guides that have been posted here is about all there is. But there is a specialist certification that includes a WAAS deployment test exam. Perhaps you can find some Cisco books on that avenue.

http://www.ciscopress.com/bookstore/product.asp?isbn=1587057492

We had a 600 in the DC and a 500 for management. Then we did the WAE modules at the client side. Needless to say they are boxed up and and we're trying to get rid of them. Anyone interested????? So I just deployed Steelhead 300's at 15 remote sites and it works great. I can move huge CIFS files over a utilized 1.5 meg pipe in seconds.

Whatever the vendor, an inline implementation is ideal. If you are going to use WCCP, make sure you check the bug tracker because I have read about bugs in every version of code I checked. It also wreaks havoc on SQL communication such as SQL mirroring.

redwarrior

That's good to know regarding inline versus WCCP. I had been batting around the idea of using WCCP or PBR to redirect traffic to the WAE on the head-end side since it will need to be connected to a VPN concentrator that is serving multiple sites and for now, only one of them will be getting a WAE installed. Basically, my current plan is to place the head-end WAE between the 6509 switch and the VPN Concentrator (7206) and hope that it can accomodate passing the rest of the traffic through without optmization. (We have 2 6509's attached to that Concentrator, so I'll use OSPF to make the one with the WAE preferred and if that link fails, failover to the 6509 without the WAE for redundancy.)

I wish I could try out Riverbed as well. Sigh.

Netstudent

If you are worried about touching unwanted data via inline, then I would shoot for WCCP on the 6500 if you can. Do service 62 with a redirect list on the interface that uplinks to the 7206 and 61 with a redirect list on the interface from which your servers are going back to the client like your server vlan.

I did wccp on our 6509 and it worked fine. The great thing about doing it on the 6500 is the 6500 can do a L2 rewrite to transparently redirect that data to the web cache on the wae and this is done in the ASIC. Whereas if you do wccp on a lower end device, then you are stuck with GRE to tunnel the redirected data which is done in the cpu.

Food for thought....