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The documentation set for this product strives to use bias-free language. For the purposes of this documentation set, bias-free is defined as language that does not imply discrimination based on age, disability, gender, racial identity, ethnic identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and intersectionality. Exceptions may be present in the documentation due to language that is hardcoded in the user interfaces of the product software, language used based on RFP documentation, or language that is used by a referenced third-party product. Learn more about how Cisco is using Inclusive Language.
This chapter provides an overview of the Cisco Wide Area Applications Services (WAAS) solution and describes the main features that enable Cisco WAAS to overcome the most common challenges in transporting data over a wide area network.
Note Throughout this chapter, the term Cisco WAAS device is used to refer collectively to the Cisco WAAS Central Managers and Cisco Wide Area Application Engines (WAEs) in your network. The term WAE refers to WAE and Cisco Wide Area Virtualization Engine (WAVE) appliances, and Cisco Virtual WAAS (vWAAS) instances.
The Cisco WAAS system consists of a set of devices called WAEs that work together to optimize TCP traffic over your network. When client and server applications attempt to communicate with each other, the network intercepts and redirects this traffic to the WAEs so that they can act on behalf of the client application and the destination server. The WAEs examine the traffic and use built-in optimization policies to determine whether to optimize the traffic or allow it to pass through your network unoptimized.
Cisco WAAS Version 5.0 introduced a new AppNav deployment model that greatly reduces dependency on the intercepting switch or router by taking on the responsibility of distributing traffic among Cisco WAAS devices for optimization. Cisco WAAS appliances with AppNav Controller Interface Modules operate in a special AppNav Controller mode, with AppNav policies controlling traffic flow to Cisco WAAS devices performing optimization. The AppNav model is well suited for data center deployments and addresses many of the WAN optimization challenges in this environment.
Note You can deploy Cisco WAAS in either the AppNav model, or in the traditional model without using AppNav Controllers.
Use the Cisco WAAS Central Manager GUI to centrally configure and monitor the WAEs and optimization policies in your network. You can also use the Cisco WAAS Central Manager GUI to create new optimization policy rules so that the Cisco WAAS system can optimize both custom applications and less common applications.
Cisco WAAS helps enterprises meet the following objectives:
– Low data rates (constrained bandwidth)
– Slow delivery of frames (high network latency)
– Higher rates of packet loss (low reliability)
Consider the following guidelines for Cisco WAAS components:
This section contains the following topics:
Table 1-1 describes how Cisco WAAS uses a combination of TCP optimization techniques and application acceleration features to overcome the most common challenges associated with transporting traffic over a WAN.
Cisco WAAS contains the following services that help optimize traffic over your wide area network:
Note Cisco WAAS Express devices provide basic optimization and compression services and some application acceleration.
Figure 1-1 shows the process that Cisco WAAS follows to optimize application traffic.
Figure 1-1 Cisco WAAS Traffic Optimization Process
The following steps describe how your Cisco WAAS network optimizes a connection between a branch office client and a destination server:
1. A branch office client attempts to connect to the destination server over the native application port.
2. The Cisco WAAS network uses (Web Cache Communication Protocol (WCCP) or policy-based routing (PBR) to intercept the client request, or if deployed on an inline WAE, Cisco WAAS can intercept the request directly, using inline mode. For more information on inline mode, see Cisco ITD Support in the chapter “Configuring Traffic Interception” .
3. The branch WAE performs the following actions:
4. The branch WAE passes along the client request through the network to its original destination server.
5. The data center WAE performs the following actions:
In an AppNav deployment, an AppNav Controller intercepts the traffic in the data center and distributes it to a Cisco WAAS node that establishes an optimized connection with the branch WAE. For more information on AppNav deployment, see the chapter “Configuring Cisco AppNav” .
6. Cisco WAAS optimizes subsequent traffic between the branch WAE and data center WAE for this connection.
Cisco WAAS does not optimize traffic in the following situations:
Note If unoptimized traffic reaches a WAE, the WAE forwards the traffic in pass-through mode without affecting the performance of the application using the passed-through connection.
Cisco WAAS uses a variety of transport flow optimization (TFO) features to optimize TCP traffic intercepted by the Cisco WAAS devices. TFO protects communicating clients and servers from negative WAN conditions, such as bandwidth constraints, packet loss, congestion, and retransmission.
Window scaling allows the receiver of a TCP packet to advertise that its TCP receive window can exceed 64 KB. The receive window size determines the amount of space that the receiver has available for unacknowledged data. By default, TCP headers limit the receive window size to 64 KB, but Windows scaling allows the TCP header to specify receive windows of up to 1 GB.
Window scaling allows TCP endpoints to take advantage of available bandwidth in your network and not be limited to the default window size specified in the TCP header.
For more information about Window scaling, refer to For more information on Cisco vWAAS, see RFC 1323.
Cisco WAAS increases the upper bound limit for TCP’s initial window from one or two segments to two to four segments (approximately 4 KB). Increasing TCP’s initial window size provides the following advantages:
For more information about this optimization feature, see Cisco WAAS, see RFC 3390.
Cisco WAAS enhances the buffering algorithm used by the TCP kernel so that WAEs can pull data from branch office clients and remote servers more aggressively. This increased buffer helps the two WAEs participating in the connection keep the link between them full, thus increasing link utilization.
Selective Acknowledgement (SACK) is an efficient packet loss recovery and retransmission feature that allows clients to recover from packet losses more quickly, compared to the default recovery mechanism used by TCP.
By default, TCP uses a cumulative acknowledgment scheme that forces a sender to either wait for a round-trip to learn if packets were not received by a recipient, or to unnecessarily retransmit segments that may have been correctly received.
SACK allows the receiver to inform the sender about all the segments that have arrived successfully, so that the sender needs to retransmit only the segments that have actually been lost.
For more information about SACK, see RFC 2018.
Binary Increase Congestion (BIC) TCP is a congestion management protocol that allows your network to recover more quickly from packet loss events.
When your network experiences a packet loss event, BIC TCP reduces the receiver’s window size and sets that reduced size as the new value for the minimum window. BIC TCP then sets the maximum window size value to the size of the window just before the packet loss event occurred. Because packet loss occurred at the maximum window size, the network can transfer traffic without dropping packets whose size falls within the minimum and maximum window size values.
If BIC TCP does not register a packet loss event at the updated maximum window size, that window size becomes the new minimum. If a packet loss event does occur, that window size becomes the new maximum. This process continues until BIC TCP determines the new optimum minimum and maximum window size values.
Cisco WAAS uses the following compression technologies to help reduce the size of data transmitted over your WAN:
These compression technologies reduce the size of transmitted data by removing redundant information before sending the shortened data stream over the WAN. By reducing the amount of transferred data, Cisco WAAS compression helps reduce network utilization and application response times.
When a WAE uses compression to optimize TCP traffic, it replaces repeated data in the stream with a much shorter reference, and then sends the shortened data stream out across the WAN. The receiving WAE uses its local redundancy library to reconstruct the data stream before passing it along to the destination client or server.
The Cisco WAAS compression scheme is based on a shared cache architecture where each WAE involved in compression and decompression shares the same redundancy library. When the cache that stores the redundancy library on a WAE becomes full, Cisco WAAS uses a FIFO algorithm to discard old data and make room for new.
LZ compression operates on smaller data streams and maintains limited compression history. DRE operates on significantly larger streams (typically tens to hundreds of bytes or more) and maintains a much larger compression history. Large chunks of redundant data is common in file system operations when files are incrementally changed from one version to another or when certain elements are common to many files, such as file headers and logos.
In addition to the TCP optimization features that speed the flow of traffic over a WAN, Cisco WAAS includes these application acceleration features:
Cisco WAAS uses application-intelligent software modules to apply these acceleration features.
The following Cisco WAAS application accelerators are available:
Note Cisco WAAS Express devices provide application acceleration for SMB, HTTP, and SSL traffic.
To enable or disable application accelerators, see Enabling and Disabling Global Optimization Features in the chapter “Configuring Application Acceleration” .
You must enable the accelerator on both of the peer WAEs at either end of a WAN link for all application accelerators to operate.
The file services (SMB accelerators) feature allows a WAE to fulfill a client’s requests more quickly instead of sending every request over the WAN to the file server. By fulfilling a client’s requests locally, the WAE minimizes the traffic sent over the WAN and reduces the time it takes branch office users to access files and many desktop applications, allowing enterprises to consolidate their important information in data centers. For more information, see the chapter “Configuring Cisco WAAS File Services” .
Note Legacy-mode Wide Area File Services (WAFS) are no longer supported. Legacy WAFS users must migrate to the SMB accelerator.
File Services include the following features:
The Edge WAE is a client-side, file-caching device that serves client requests at remote sites and branch offices. The device is deployed at each branch office or remote campus, replacing file and print servers and giving local clients fast, near-LAN read and write access to a cached view of the centralized storage. By caching the data most likely to be used at these sites, Edge WAEs greatly reduce the number of requests and the volume of data that must be transferred over the WAN between the data center and the edge.
When requests for data that is not located in the cache are received, the Edge WAE encapsulates the original SMB request using a TCP/IP-based protocol, compresses it, and sends it over the WAN to the Core WAE. Data returned from the data center is distributed by the Edge WAE to the end user who requested it.
The Core WAE is a server-side component that resides at the data center and connects directly to one or more file servers or network-attached storage (NAS). Core WAEs are placed between the file servers at the data center and the WAN connecting the data center to the enterprise’s remote sites and branch offices. Requests received from Edge WAEs over the WAN are translated by the Core WAE into its original file server protocol and forwarded to the appropriate file server. The data center Core WAEs can provide load balancing and failover support.
When the data is received from the file server, the Core WAE encapsulates and compresses it before sending it over the WAN back to the Edge WAE that requested it. Core WAEs can be arranged in logical clusters to provide scalability and automatic failover capabilities for high-availability environments.
The Cisco WAAS software includes the following print services options:
Note The Legacy Print Services feature is no longer supported. Users of Legacy Print Services must migrate to another print services option.
These services eliminate the need for a separate hardware print server in the branch office. Cisco WAAS print services are available for Windows clients and work with any IP-based network printer.
The Cisco WAAS software provides the following interfaces to help you manage, configure, and monitor the various elements of your Cisco WAAS network:
Every Cisco WAAS network must have one primary Cisco WAAS Central Manager device that is responsible for managing the other Cisco WAAS devices in your network. The Cisco WAAS Central Manager device hosts the Cisco WAAS Central Manager GUI, a Web-based interface that allows you to configure, manage, and monitor the WAAS devices in your network. The Cisco WAAS Central Manager resides on a dedicated WAE device.
The Cisco WAAS Central Manager GUI allows administrators to perform the following tasks:
Note You cannot enable optimization and application acceleration services on a WAE that has been configured as a Cisco WAAS Central Manager. The purpose of the Cisco WAAS Central Manager is to configure, monitor, and manage the WAEs in your network.
To access the Cisco WAAS Central Manager GUI, enter the following URL in your web browser:
The WAE_Address value is the IP address or hostname of the Cisco WAAS Central Manager device.
The default administrator username is admin and the password is default. For information on creating accounts and changing passwords, see the chapter “Configuring Administrative Login Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting” .
If the Central Manager has been configured with an IPV6 address, it can be accessed using https://[CM ipv6 address]:8443/
The default administrator username is admin and the password is default. For information on creating accounts and changing passwords, see the chapter “Configuring Administrative Login Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting” .
Ensure that your web browser is set to use Unicode (UTF-8) character encoding.
When using Microsoft Internet Explorer to access the Cisco WAAS Central Manager GUI, you may see a “Choose a digital certificate” dialog box. Click Cancel to proceed to the Cisco WAAS Central Manager login window.
You may also see a browser security warning that there is a problem with the website’s security certificate. This occurs because the Cisco WAAS Central Manager uses a self-signed certificate. Click on the link Continue to this website (not recommended). To avoid this error in the future, install the certificate.
To install the certificate in Internet Explorer 8:
1. Click the red Certificate Error button in the address bar.
5. Choose Automatically select the certificate store based on the type of certificate.
8. At the Security Warning, at the Acknowledgment, click OK.
9. At the Certificate dialog box, click OK.
The certificate installation procedure differs depending on the browser.
Consider the following guidelines as you use the Cisco WAAS Central Manager:
Note In Microsoft Internet Explorer Version 8 and Version 9, bookmarks to Cisco WAAS Central Manager pages other than the home page also go to the home page. In Microsoft Internet Explorer Version 10 and Version 11, bookmarks work as expected.
Note A known issue in Google Chrome Version 44.0 may prevent some Cisco WAAS Central Manager pages, including Software Updates, Device Listings, and Reports, from loading properly. In Google Chrome Version 43.0 all Cisco WAAS Central Manager pages work as expected.
If the number of concurrent sessions permitted also is exceeded for that user, there is no way for that user to regain access to the Cisco WAAS Central Manager GUI until after the timeout expires.
Figure 1-2 shows the main components of the Cisco WAAS Central Manager GUI.
Figure 1-2 Components of the Cisco WAAS Central Manager GUI
The Cisco WAAS Central Manager GUI includes the following main components:
– Logout: Logs out the current user from the Cisco WAAS Central Manager.
– Help: Opens a separate window displaying Cisco WAAS context-sensitive help.
– About: Displays the Cisco WAAS About window that shows the Cisco WAAS Central Manager version number.
The upper level of the menu bar allows you to choose one of the five contexts available in the Cisco WAAS Central Manager GUI:
Figure 1-3 Cisco WAAS Central Manager Device Context
The Cisco WAAS Central Manager GUI includes the following items to help you navigate:
If you are in the device group context, this link is named Device Groups and it returns you to the All Device Groups page. If you are in the AppNav Cluster context, this link is named AppNav Clusters and it returns you to the All AppNav Clusters page.
If you are in the location context, this link is named Locations and it returns you to the All Locations page.
In the Devices and AppNav Clusters menu bar options, a small target icon appears when you hover your mouse over a device or cluster name. Place your cursor over the target icon to open a dialog box that shows the device or cluster status (see Figure 1-4).
Figure 1-4 Devices Context Menu
The Cisco WAAS Central Manager menu bar contains two levels of menus:
Menus contain different functions when a particular device, device group, AppNav cluster, or location is selected than when you are in the global context.
Some menu options contain submenus. Hover the mouse over the triangle to the right of the menu option name to open the submenu.
Note The functions available for Cisco WAAS Express devices are a subset of those available for other Cisco WAAS devices. However, some functions are not available on Cisco WAAS Express devices.
Table 1-3 describes the taskbar icons in the Cisco WAAS Central Manager GUI.
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Refreshes the current page of the Cisco WAAS Central Manager GUI. |
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Deletes a Cisco WAAS element, such as a device or device group. |
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Filters the information in a table to make it easier to locate a specific item. |
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Displays all the items in a table on a single page instead of displaying them over multiple pages. |
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Selects all the valid items in a table. For example, if you are distributing print drivers to a Cisco WAAS print server, you can click this icon to select all the drivers in the list that the print server should download. |
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Activates all the inactive Cisco WAAS and Cisco WAAS Express devices in your Cisco WAAS network. |
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Reapplies the device configuration as seen in the Cisco WAAS Central Manager GUI to the device. Normally, changes made in the Cisco WAAS Central Manager GUI are applied to the device as soon as the configuration is submitted. From time to time, however, a CLI error or some other error on the device may cause the configuration on the device to differ from what is seen in the Cisco WAAS Central Manager GUI. The Force Full Database Update icon applies the full configuration that the Cisco WAAS Central Manager has for the device to be updated, to the device, and the configuration is reapplied. When using the Request FullUpdate icon from the device group window, the full device configuration is reapplied to each device in the device group. Group settings do not overwrite device-specific settings. You can view device CLI errors in the System Message window described in Viewing the System Message Log in the chapter “Troubleshooting Your Cisco WAAS Network” . The Force Full Database Update icon appears on the Device Dashboard window, described in Device Dashboard Window in the chapter “Monitoring Your Cisco WAAS Network” . The Request FullUpdate icon appears in the Modifying Device Group window. Note These functions do not apply to Cisco WAAS Express devices. |
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Reboots a WAE or device group depending on the location in the Cisco WAAS Central Manager GUI. Reload is not available for Cisco WAAS Express devices. |
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Forces the device group configuration across all the devices in that group. For more information, see Forcing Device Group Settings on All Devices in the Group in the chapter “Using Device Groups and Device Locations” . |
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Allows you to specify device-specific settings that override the group settings for the device. For more information, see Overriding the Device Group Settings on a Device in the chapter “Using Device Groups and Device Locations” . |
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Deletes all the Cisco WAAS elements of a particular type, such as IP ACL conditions. |
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Allows you choose which charts to display in the Device Dashboard window. |
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Copies interception settings to other devices (not available for inline interception). |
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Restores the default predefined optimization policy rules on the device or device group. For more information, see Restoring Optimization Policies and Class Maps in the chapter “Configuring Application Acceleration” . |
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Displays the topology map that shows all the TFO connections among your WAE devices. For more information, see the Topology Report in Chapter 15, “Monitoring Your WAAS Network.” |
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Displays the configuration page used to create applications. For more information, see Viewing a List of Applications on a Cisco WAE Device or Device Group in Chapter 12, “Configuring Application Acceleration.” |
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Allows you to truncate the system message log based on size, date, or message content. For more information, see Viewing the System Message Log in Chapter 16, “Troubleshooting Your WAAS Network.” |
The Cisco WAAS Central Manager monitoring application programming interface (API), provides a programmable interface for system developers to integrate with customized or third-party monitoring and management applications. The Cisco WAAS Central Manager monitoring API communicates with the Cisco WAAS Central Manager to retrieve status information and monitoring statistics.
The Cisco Central Manager monitoring API is a Web Service implementation. Web Service is defined by the W3C standard as a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine (client and server) interaction over the network. The client and server communication follows the Simple Object Access Protocol or Service Oriented Architecture Protocol (SOAP) standard.
The Cisco WAAS CLI allows you to configure, manage, and monitor WAEs on a per-device basis through a console connection or a terminal emulation program. The Cisco WAAS CLI also allows you to configure certain features that are supported only through the CLI (for example, configuring the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol [LDAP] signing on a WAE). We strongly recommend that you use the Cisco WAAS Central Manager GUI instead of the Cisco WAAS CLI, whenever possible.
Note You must wait for approximately 10 minutes (two data feed poll cycles) after registering a WAE with the Cisco WAAS Central Manager before making any CLI configuration changes on the WAE. Any CLI configuration changes made sooner may be overwritten when the Cisco WAAS Central Manager updates the WAE. We strongly recommend making all configuration changes by using the Cisco WAAS Central Manager GUI.
The Cisco WAAS CLI is organized into four command modes. Each command mode has its own set of commands to use for the configuration, maintenance, and monitoring of a WAE. The commands that are available to you depend on the mode you are in. When you enter a question mark (?) at the system prompt, you can obtain a list of commands available for each command mode.
The four Cisco WAAS command modes are as follows:
For information about using the CLI to configure a Cisco WAAS device, see the Cisco Wide Area Application Services Command Reference and the Cisco Wide Area Application Services Quick Configuration Guide.
This section describes the benefits of Cisco WAAS and includes the following topics:
Many optimization products create tunnels through routers and other networking devices, which result in a loss of source TCP/IP information in the optimized data. This loss of TCP/IP information often disrupts important network services (such as QoS and NBAR), and can disrupt proper operation of traffic analysis tools such as NetFlow and security products and features such as ACLs and IP-based firewalls.
Unlike other optimization products, Cisco WAAS seamlessly integrates into your network and preserves all TCP/IP header information in the traffic that it optimizes, so that your existing analysis tools and security products are not compromised.
Cisco WAAS includes an autodiscovery feature that enables WAEs to automatically locate peer WAEs on your network. After autodiscovering a peer device, the WAEs can terminate and separate the LAN-to-WAN TCP connections and add a buffering layer to resolve the differing speeds. Once a WAE establishes a connection to a peer WAE, the two devices can establish an optimized link for TCP traffic, or pass the traffic through as unoptimized.
The autodiscovery of peer Cisco WAAS devices is achieved using proprietary TCP options. These TCP options are only recognized and understood by Cisco WAAS devices and are ignored by non Cisco WAAS devices.
Cisco WAAS Web-based management tools (Cisco WAAS Central Manager GUI) enable IT administrators to centrally define, monitor, and manage policies for each WAAS device, such as usage quota, backups, disaster recovery, restores, access control, and security policies. IT administrators can also perform the following tasks:
IT administrators benefit from the following features of Cisco WAAS:
In the event of data loss, backup files exist in the data center and can be quickly accessed for recovery purposes. The amount of data loss is reduced because of the increased frequency of backups performed on the centralized storage in the data center. This centralized storage backup makes disaster recovery much more efficient and economical than working with standalone file servers or NAS appliances.
The common file services feature in Cisco WAAS maintains files locally, close to the clients. Changes made to files are immediately stored in the local branch WAE, and then streamed to the central file server. Files stored centrally appear as local files to branch users, which improves access performance. SMB caching includes the following features:
The Web Cache Communication Protocol (WCCP) developed by Cisco Systems specifies interactions between one or more routers (or Layer 3 switches) and one or more application appliances, web caches, and caches of other application protocols. The purpose of the interaction is to establish and maintain the transparent redirection of selected types of traffic flowing through a group of routers. The selected traffic is redirected to a group of appliances. Any type of TCP traffic can be redirected.
The WCCP v2 protocol has a built-in set of beneficial features, for example, automatic failover and load balancing. The router monitors the liveness of each WAE attached to it through the WCCP keepalive messages, and if a WAE goes down, the router stops redirecting packets to the WAE. By using WCCP, the branch WAE avoids becoming a single point of failure. The router can also load balance the traffic among a number of branch WAEs.
Cisco WAAS supports transparent interception of TCP sessions through WCCP. Once WCCP is turned on at both the router and the branch WAE, only new sessions are intercepted. Existing sessions are not affected.
Policy-based routing (PBR) allows IT organizations to configure their network devices (a router or a Layer 4 to Layer 6 switch) to selectively route traffic to the next hop based on the classification of the traffic. Cisco WAAS administrators can use PBR to transparently integrate a WAE into their existing branch office network and data centers. PBR can be used to establish a route that goes through a WAE for some or all packets based on the defined policies.
For more information about PBR, see the chapter “Configuring Traffic Interception” .
Direct inline traffic interception is supported on WAEs with a Cisco WAE Inline Network Adapter or Interface Module installed. Inline interception of traffic simplifies deployment and avoids the complexity of configuring WCCP or PBR on the routers.
An inline WAE transparently intercepts traffic flowing through it or bridges traffic that does not need to be optimized. It also uses a mechanical fail-safe design that automatically bridges traffic if a power, hardware, or unrecoverable software failure occurs.
Note AppNav Controller Interface Modules do not support automatic bypass mode to continue traffic flow in the event of a failure. For high availability, two or more AppNav Controller Interface Modules should be deployed in an AppNav cluster. For more information on using inline mode with the AppNav solution, see the chapter “Configuring Cisco AppNav”.
You can configure the inline WAE to accept traffic only from certain VLANs; for all other VLANs, traffic is bridged and not processed.
You can serially cluster inline WAE devices to provide higher availability in the event of a device failure. If the current optimizing device fails, the second inline WAE device in the cluster provides the optimization services. Deploying WAE devices in a serial inline cluster for the purposes of scaling or load balancing is not supported.
For more information about inline mode, see the Cisco ITD Support in the chapter “Configuring Traffic Interception” .
Cisco WAAS provides a high-availability failover (and load-balancing) function that minimizes the probability and duration of SMB downtime.
If a WAE configured for SMB fails, all peer WAEs configured to operate with it are redirected to work with an alternate WAE. This operation maintains high availability without service interruption.
This change may not be transparent to users, which means that client connections are closed and require SMB clients to reestablish their connection. Whether such changes impact currently running applications depends on the behavior of the application being used, and on the behavior of the specific SMB client. Typically, however, the transition is transparent to the client.
Cisco WAAS provides the following Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) capability for increased storage capacity or increased reliability:
Systems with RAID-5 can continue operating if one of the physical drives fails or goes offline.
Note RAID Controller Firmware 12.12.0(0060) or later version is required for Toshiba SSD to work on WAVE 8541 model. Else it is unable to create a RAID.
Because the software must perform each disk write operation against two disk drives, the filesystem write performance may be affected.
Cisco WAAS supports disk encryption, which addresses the need to securely protect sensitive information that flows through deployed Cisco WAAS systems and that is stored in Cisco WAAS persistent storage.
Cisco WAAS does not introduce any additional maintenance overhead on already overburdened IT staffs. Cisco WAAS avoids adding its own proprietary user management layer, and instead makes use of the users, user credentials, and access control lists maintained by the file servers. All security-related protocol commands are delegated directly to the source file servers and the source domain controllers. Any user recognized on the domain and source file server are automatically recognized by Cisco WAAS with the same security level, and all without additional configuration or management.
Cisco WAAS delegates access control and authentication decisions to the origin file server.
Cisco WAAS supports Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) including SNMPv1, SNMPv2, and SNMPv3. Cisco WAAS supports many of the most commonly used SNMP managers, such as HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli NetView.
Most Cisco WAAS traps are also recorded in the logs displayed in the Cisco WAAS Central Manager GUI, although some (such as exceeding the maximum number of sessions) are reported only to the SNMP manager.
Cisco WAAS supports parameters based on SNMPv2, enabling it to integrate into a common SNMP management system. These parameters enable system administrators to monitor the current state of the Cisco WAAS network and its level of performance.
Exported parameters are divided into the following categories:
For more information about SNMP and supported MIBs, see the chapter “Configuring SNMP Monitoring” .
Release 6.0 onwards, IPv6 support is implemented for management access to Cisco WAAS devices. Basic IPv6 connectivity can be enabled on the Cisco WAAS interfaces by assigning IPv6 addresses, configuring default gateway and static IP routes. This can be further enhanced by configuring support for AAAA record types in the Domain Name System (DNS) name-to-address and address-to-name lookup processes and by managing IPv6 neighbor discovery
All devices in the Cisco WAAS network can communicate in the IPv6 network using Telnet, SSH, FTP, TFTP, in IPv6 addresses. The management plane can configure IPv6 address for syslog, AAA servers, NTP servers, SNMP servers and name servers to communicate with Cisco WAAS devices.