IT organizations are realizing the benefits of infrastructure consolidation and virtualization—cost savings, operational savings, better posture toward disaster recovery—and the challenges associated. Consolidating infrastructure increases the distance between the remote office worker and the tools they need to ensure productivity—applications, servers, content, and more. Application acceleration and WAN optimization solutions such as Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) bridge the divide between consolidation and performance to enable a high-performance consolidated infrastructure.
The goal of this book is to familiarize you with the concepts and fundamentals of sizing and deploying Cisco WAAS in your environment. This book provides a technical introduction to the product, followed by deployment sizing guidelines, through integration techniques, and configuration of major components and subsystems. This book provides you with 95 percent or more of the knowledge that you need to ensure a successful deployment of Cisco WAAS in your environment, including configuration tips, pointers, and notes that will guide you through the process.
This book is written for anyone who is responsible for the design and deployment of Cisco WAAS in their network environment. The text assumes the reader has a basic knowledge of data networking, specifically TCP/IP and basic routing and switching technologies.
As the WAAS technology continues to evolve, the content in this book will provide a solid framework to build on. Mastering the topics in this book will ensure that you can approach any WAAS design project with confidence.
Although this book could be read cover to cover, it is designed to be flexible and allow you to easily move between chapters and sections of chapters to cover just the material that you need more work with. While each of the chapters builds upon the foundation laid by previous chapters, enough background information is provided in each chapter to allow it to be a standalone reference work in and of itself. Chapter 1 provides a technical examination of the Cisco WAAS product and its core capabilities, along with use cases and the “why you care” about each of the solution components. Chapters 2 through 9 are the core chapters and, although they can be covered in any order, it is recommended that they be covered sequentially for continuity. Chapter 10 provides a series of use cases for the Cisco WAAS product family, which can also provide insight into how other customers are using this technology to meet their business infrastructure requirements.
Chapter 1, “Introduction to Cisco Wide Area Application Services”: This chapter provides a technical examination and overview of Cisco WAAS and its core components.
Chapter 2, “Cisco Wide Area Application Engine (WAE) Family”: This chapter discusses the Cisco WAE appliance and router-integrated network module hardware family, positioning of each of the platforms, and system specifications that impact the design of a solution relative to the performance and scalability of each component.
Chapter 3, “Planning, Discovery, and Analysis”: Planning is a critical part to any successful WAAS deployment. Spending ample time at the beginning of the project to understand the requirements, including those imposed by the existing network environment, is critical for a successful deployment. Chapter 3 gives you a head start by outlining the key topic areas that should be taken into consideration as you are planning your WAAS deployment.
Chapter 4, “Network Integration and Interception”: This chapter provides an in-depth review of the network integration and interception capabilities of Cisco WAAS. The topics discussed in Chapter 4 form the foundation for the design discussions in subsequent chapters.
Chapter 5, “Branch Office Network Integration”: This chapter provides a detailed discussion of the different design options for deploying Cisco WAAS in the branch office environment. Several design options are discussed, including detailed configuration examples.
Chapter 6, “Data Center Network Integration”: This chapter examines the key design considerations for deploying WAAS in the data center. Sample design models and configuration examples are provided throughout the chapter. Best practices recommendations for scaling to support hundreds or thousands of remote sites are also included.
Chapter 7, “System and Device Management”: This chapter walks you through the initial deployment of the Central Manager and each of the accelerator WAEs, including the setup script, registration, activation, and use of management techniques such as device groups. This chapter also provides you with a series of helpful sections on commonly used configuration items, such as syslog and SNMP.
Chapter 8, “Configuring WAN Optimization”: This chapter guides you through the WAN optimization framework provided by Cisco WAAS, including each of the optimization techniques and the Application Traffic Policy manager. This chapter also examines the configuration of optimization policies, verification that policies are applied correctly, and an examination of statistics and reports.
Chapter 9, “Configuring Application Acceleration”: This chapter focuses on the application acceleration components of Cisco WAAS, including configuration, verification, and how the components interact. This chapter also looks closely at how these components leverage the underlying WAN optimization framework, and how they are managed.
Chapter 10, “Case Studies”: This chapter brings together various topics discussed in the previous chapters through several case studies. The case studies presented focus on real-world deployment examples, discussing the key design considerations, options, and final device-level configurations.