Cisco Wide Area Application Services Software Release 5.2 Data Sheet

Product Overview

Cisco^® Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) currently provides the industry’s most scalable, highest-performance WAN optimization solution. Cisco WAAS can improve the end-user experience and reduce bandwidth for applications, including Microsoft Exchange, Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop, SAP, IBM Lotus Notes, NetApp SnapMirror, HTTP and HTTPS, cloud, and file applications.

Cisco WAAS helps enable organizations to implement important business initiatives, including:

●   Highly secure, scalable, enterprise-wide bring-your-own-device (BYOD) solutions

●   High-performance virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and Cisco Virtual Experience Infrastructure (Cisco VXI^™)

●   Live and on-demand media applications such as webcasting, e-learning, and digital signage

●   High-performance, public and private cloud services and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications

●   Improved application performance and end-user experience for applications, including web, email, VDI, file, and cloud applications

●   Reduced WAN bandwidth requirements and deferral of expensive bandwidth upgrades

●   Reduced branch footprint through server and service consolidation

●   Data center consolidation, virtualization, and automation

Cisco WAAS Leadership

Cisco is the leader in WAN optimization, as confirmed by IT professionals from both Nemertes Research and IT Brand Pulse, for leadership in overall market, price, performance, reliability, service and support, and innovation. In addition, Cisco AppNav for WAAS won the 2012 Best of Interop award (Figure 1).

Key Features and Benefits of Cisco WAAS Software Release 5.2

Cisco WAAS Software Release 5.2 helps enable virtualization of optimization resources across the enterprise. Cisco WAAS virtualization is scalable, highly secure, and robust, enabling migration to cloud-based services. With Cisco WAAS Release 5.2, the agile and optimized WAN has cloud connectivity and end-to-end, standards-based application security.

Benefits delivered by Cisco WAAS Release 5.2 include:

1.     Three new virtual WAAS (vWAAS) models: 1300-connection, 2500-connection, and 50,000-connection

2.     AppNav-XE running natively on Cisco routers, including Cisco ASR 1000, Cisco Cloud Services Router 1000V (CSR 1000V)

3.     Central Manager supported for integrated AppNav in CSR 1000V and ASR 1000 Series routers

4.     Software to support Solid State Device (SSD) on Cisco Wide Area Virtualization Engine (WAVE) Appliances, including WAVE-294, WAVE-594, and WAVE-8541

5.     Adding vPath 2.0 support on Cisco vWAAS Software Release 5.2

6.     Print Application Optimization (AO) enhancements

Main Features

1.     New vWAAS models include vWAAS-1300, vWAAS-2500 and vWAAS-50,000

The vWAAS-50000 model establishes Cisco as an industry leader in the number of maximum connections with a lower price per connection. vWAAS-50000 also allows users to connect at 1 Gbps speed.

●   vWAAS-1300 and vWAAS-2500 models can run in Cisco UCS^® E-Series Blade Server models 140S, 140D, and 160D. They are supported in the Cisco ISR Generation 2 (ISR G2) and the CISCO 4451-X ISR. For Cisco UCS E-Series Blade Server specifications and support configurations refer to the Cisco UCS E-Series data sheet.

vWAAS-1300, vWAAS-2500, and vWAAS-50,000 are supported only in an open server running with VMware ESX4.1, ESXi5.0, or ESXi5.1. To upgrade from an existing WAAS deployment, please see the Cisco WAAS Release 5.2 installation and configuration guide.

●   For the vWAAS sizing guide, please refer to the updated Cisco WAAS Release 5.2 sizing guidelines found on existing Cisco WAAS web pages.

●   vWAAS 5.2 will support VMware vSphere ESXi 4.4, 5.0, and 5.1. However, for new deployments only a single OVA file will be released that supports 5.0 and 5.1. Upgrade and install instructions can be found through existing WAAS update information below. New WAAS customers using ESXi 4.1 must first deploy vWAAS 5.1 OVA-7, and then follow the update instructions above. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/app_ntwk_services/waas/waas/upgrade/guide/waas_upgrade-50.html#wp55285.

Table 1 offers a summary of the ESXi support matrix.

Table 1.       ESXi Support Matrix

2.     AppNav-XE on the Cisco ASR 1000 Series, CSR 1000V Series

Cisco award-winning AppNav technology can now run natively on the ASR 1000, CSR 1000V without the need for a separate appliance, which further simplifies AppNav deployment. These routers requires minimum of IOS-15.3(2)S1 or later on CSR 1000V and ASR 1000.

With ASR-AppNav-XE, simply enable the command line on the ASR 1000 or through central manager (see Figure 2).

With AppNav-XE on the CSR 1000V, customers can now deploy WAN optimization more securely and allow interception and distribution to vWAAS - all within a virtualized environment (see Figure 3).

3.     Updated Central Manager to support AppNav-XE

WAAS Software Release 5.2 comes with an updated central manager to support new functionality: AppNav‑XE.

4.     Software to SSD Support on the Cisco WAVE 294, WAVE 594, and WAVE 8541

With WAAS Software Release 5.2 and later releases the WAVE 294, 594, and 8541 may optionally be equipped with SSDs. The SSDs provide superior reliability and longevity compared to traditional hard disk drives (HDDs).

Platforms that support SSD drives in the WAAS Software Release 5.2 are listed in Table 3.

Table 2.       Platforms and Support

For more information about SSD/HDD support, refer to the updated WAVE hardware data sheet.

5.     vPATH 2.0

In the 5.2 release, vPath version 2 will be supported.

The new vWAAS will be able to perform with vPath 2.0. Benefits of vPath2.0 include support VXLAN and service chaining. The vPath service chaining feature allows virtual machine (VM) traffic to be treated by multiple services in a given sequence.

●   Customers with the Cisco Nexus^® 1000V Switch deployed using vPath 2.0, can select to deploy the 5.2 release vWAAS with other virtual services such as Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA 1000V), Cisco Virtual Security Gateway (VSG). - Figure 4 illustrates how the services and technologies run together in a network.

●   For more information on Cisco Nexus 1000V and vPath technology, please refer to the Cisco Nexus 1000V data sheet found on Cisco.com.

6.     Print Application Optimization (Print AO) Enhancement

Increasingly, many customers are consolidating print servers at the headend or aggregation point. For long latency WAN branches, Cisco print AO can drastically improve the response time. In WAAS Software Release 5.2, Server Message Block (SMB) version 1 print traffic optimization is supported for customers who transition from Common Internet File System (CIFS) to SMB.

Market Trends Addressed by Cisco WAAS Software Release 5.2

●   Desktop and application virtualization: Enterprises are increasingly adopting desktop and application virtualization solutions to achieve various objectives. These include compliance, end-of-life extension, operation efficiency, savings in capital expenditures (CapEx) and operating expenditures (OpEx, network agility, etc. Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) places an increasing burden on the WAN because application performance, security, and manageability expectations need to be maintained as work shifts to a VDI environment, increasing the pressure on IT to deploy an agile and optimized WAN.

●   Public and virtual private clouds: Enterprises are looking to the cloud to reduce IT costs and accelerate delivery of new applications to end users. Organizations such as the U.S. government, as well as many private companies, have mandated that IT departments investigate cloud-based offerings as part of their internal sourcing and outsourcing decisions. To facilitate this cloud-based model, a WAN optimization solution should be able to intelligently pool and provision resources elastically in a simplified manner with excellent manageability for enterprisewide deployments.

●   Branch-office and data center simplification: Organizations want simple enterprisewide deployment of multiple, on-demand cloud-ready services with the smallest footprint possible and a high return on investment (ROI).

●   Software delivery of network applications: This trend continues to accelerate with the proliferation and maturation of server virtualization technologies from vendors such as VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft. In addition to addressing the challenges of VDI, the WAN must now provide a state-of-the-art secure cloud connection. Therefore, a WAN optimization solution must be transparent and jointly validated and supported by leading industry vendors.

●   Security and data protection: Certain regulatory requirements, including the Payment Card Industry (PCI), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Sarbanes-Oxley, and Federal Core Desktop initiatives, are mandating stringent security for the transmission of sensitive data. Security standards continue to evolve in response to increasing numbers of compromised systems. The WAN must not only optimize applications and data, but also protect them.

Unique Advantages of Cisco WAAS

Cisco WAAS offers numerous benefits that distinguish it from other WAN optimization products. It provides the most choices for WAN optimization with the broadest portfolio on the market today.

●   Software-based WAN optimization solutions

◦     Cisco WAAS on the Cisco ISR G2 platform provides router-integrated, on-demand WAN optimization for branch offices. The Cisco Services-Ready Engine (SRE) Modules on the Cisco ISR G2 platform decouple software services from the underlying hardware and can deliver WAN optimization as an on-demand service as required by business objectives and IT budget. This approach makes better use of existing investments while offering business agility.

◦     Cisco vWAAS is a virtual appliance that accelerates business applications delivered from private and virtual private cloud infrastructure, helping to ensure an optimal user experience. Cisco vWAAS allows cloud providers to rapidly create WAN optimization services with little network configuration or disruption. Cisco vWAAS employs policy-based configuration in Cisco Nexus 1000V Series Switches, which allows association with application server virtual machines as they are instantiated or moved.

◦     Cisco WAAS Express extends the Cisco WAAS product portfolio with a small-footprint, cost-effective Cisco IOS Software solution integrated into Cisco ISR G2 devices to offer bandwidth optimization capabilities. Cisco WAAS Express increases remote-user productivity, reduces WAN bandwidth costs, and offers investment protection by interoperating with existing Cisco WAAS infrastructure.

◦     Cisco WAAS Mobile delivers bidirectional compression, application-specific accelerators, and flow optimizers for mobile and remote users. It does so in situations in which neither an appliance nor a branch office router is available or practical, and in public cloud environments that cannot support an appliance.

●   Full appliance portfolio

◦     Branch office appliances support Cisco WAAS virtual blades for local hosting of branch office IT services, reducing the branch office footprint.

◦     Scalable data center platforms support small to large data centers across a wide range of deployment scenarios and price points.

●   Cisco AppNav technology: Cisco AppNav helps customers to virtualize WAN optimization resources in the data center by pooling them into one elastic resource in a manner that is policy based and on demand, with exceptionally low-latency performance. Customers can add capacity or dedicate capacity to specific applications or geographies based on business requirements with no change to existing network configurations or topologies. Cisco AppNav integrates transparently into any physical or virtual network infrastructure, providing significant investment protection for existing network designs. Cisco AppNav for Cisco WAAS provides flexible deployment options, as shown in Figure 7.

●   Citrix-ready WAN optimization: Cisco WAAS Release 5.2 is fully certified and jointly supported by Citrix for use with Citrix HDX XenApp and XenDesktop solutions. Preconfigured acceleration for Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp using Citrix’s default security and other configuration settings allows out-of-the-box deployment that scales more securely while helping to enable high performance over the WAN.

●   Cisco WAAS Central Manager: HTML 5 user-friendly interfaces provide detailed visibility into application performance, pass-through traffic, and the control and monitoring of specific context-aware devices, including clusters.

Cisco WAAS also offers a proven, end-to-end architectural approach with Cisco Validated Designs to reduce TCO and ease deployment challenges.

Cisco WAAS is the only WAN optimization solution that has published jointly validated designs with major application vendors such as Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, and IBM. Validated designs assist Cisco customers by offering best practices to successfully incorporate IT infrastructure such as Cisco switches, routers, security devices, and servers, thus significantly reducing the risk of deploying WAN optimization to accelerate these applications. Coupled with award-winning Cisco global support and advanced services, Cisco WAAS gives customers a significant set of resources to help ensure full network integration while reducing maintenance costs and deployment time.

For example, with Microsoft, Cisco has developed an optimized branch office architecture that uses Cisco WAAS to optimize performance of centralized applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, and file services. Most Microsoft Windows branch office services and applications can be locally hosted on Cisco WAAS devices using Cisco WAAS virtual blades. The Cisco WAAS optimization for Microsoft Windows protocols was developed with Microsoft, and the relevant intellectual property rights (IPRs) are licensed from Microsoft.

Network Services Integration Provides Transparent, Highly Secure, and Reliable Application Performance

Cisco WAAS transparent architecture helps enable integration into the network and preservation of existing network services, thereby making WAN acceleration easy to deploy and operate.

●   Network transparency and preservation of IP and TCP header information allows ease of operation and interoperability with network services such as QoS, NetFlow, access control lists (ACLs), firewalls, Cisco Performance Routing (PfR), and IP service-level agreements (SLAs).

●   Cisco WAAS offers automatic discovery of optimization devices, simplifying operations for all types of WAN architecture (including Multiprotocol Label Switching [MPLS], hierarchical networks, and hub-and-spoke topologies).

●   Cisco WAAS integrates with all the Cisco firewalls - including Cisco IOS Firewall, Cisco PIX^® Firewall Software, Cisco ASA 5500 Series Enterprise Firewall Edition, and Cisco Catalyst^® 6500 Series Firewall Services Module (FWSM) - to provide the only solution in the industry that gives customers full stateful firewall inspection and network virus-scanning capabilities for accelerated traffic.

●   For inline deployments, Cisco WAAS offers a low-latency voice over IP (VoIP) traffic bypass feature that has been stress-tested with Cisco VoIP test beds.

Deployment Options

Cisco WAAS provides flexible deployment options, as shown in Figure 7 and summarized in Table 4.

Table 3.       Cisco WAAS Flexible Deployment Options

Features and Benefits

Table 5 summarizes the main features and benefits of Cisco WAAS. For detailed information about acceleration for mobile users, please refer to the Cisco WAAS Mobile data sheet. For the features and benefits of Cisco WAAS Express, please refer to the Cisco WAAS Express data sheet.

Table 4.       Benefits and Features of Cisco WAAS

Licensing

Cisco WAAS offers the following licenses based on feature capabilities:

●   Cisco WAAS Transport License - This license provides the WAN optimization features of Cisco WAAS, including DRE, Lempel-Ziv (LZ) compression, and TFO, optimizing application delivery to the branch office.

●   Cisco WAAS Enterprise License - This license provides transport license functions plus application-specific accelerations for protocols including CIFS, MAPI, HTTP, SSL, NFS, ICA, and Microsoft Windows print services to facilitate application acceleration, WAN optimization, and IT consolidation.

●   Cisco WAAS Live Video License - This add-on license provides wide-scale delivery of live video to the branch office across the WAN. It offers automated edge-stream splitting to help ensure that only one video stream is downloaded over the WAN regardless of the number of users in the branch office viewing that stream. This option is available only when the Cisco WAAS Enterprise License is ordered.

●   Cisco WAAS Virtual Blade License - This add-on license helps enable local hosting of server OS and applications on Cisco WAAS appliances. This option is available only when the Cisco WAAS Enterprise License is ordered. It is available for Cisco WAVE 294, 594, and 694 with Cisco WAAS Software Version 4.4 or later.

●   Cisco WAAS Virtual Blade License with Microsoft Windows Server Core 2008 - This add-on license offers organizations flexible delivery of branch office IT services while reducing the device footprint. The first set of certified and supported hosted services includes Microsoft Windows Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, and print as part of the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 core services. This option is available only for Cisco WAVE 294, 594, and 694 with Cisco WAAS Software Version 4.4 or later.

For details about models, pricing, and sizing, contact your local Cisco account representative.

Ordering Information

For ordering information, contact your local Cisco account representative.

Upgrade from Previous Cisco WAAS Software Versions

Customers who have an active Software Application Support plus Upgrades (SASU) contract in place can upgrade from previous Cisco WAAS Software versions to Cisco WAAS Software Version 5.2 at no additional cost.

WCCP Support

WCCP is a free Cisco IOS Software feature that runs on the following Cisco platforms:

●   Cisco routers such as the Cisco 1800, 2800, and 3800 Series ISRs; Cisco 1900, 2900, and 3900 Series ISR G2; Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches; and Cisco ASR 1000 Series Routers.

●   Cisco switches such as the Cisco Catalyst 3750, 4500, and 6500 Series Switches and Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches.

Service and Support

Cisco offers a wide range of services programs to accelerate customer success. These innovative services programs are delivered through a unique combination of people, processes, tools, and partners, resulting in high levels of customer satisfaction. Cisco Services offerings help you protect your network investment, optimize network operations, and prepare the network for new applications to extend network intelligence and the power of your business. For more information about Cisco Services, see Cisco Technical Support Services and Cisco Advanced Services.

For More Information

For more information about Cisco WAAS Software Version 5.2, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/waas or contact your local account representative.