Product Overview

The Catalyst 6500 Series Content Switching Module (CSM) provides high-performance server load balancing (SLB) among groups of servers, server farms, firewalls, caches, VPN termination devices, and other network devices, based on Layer 3 as well as Layer 4 through Layer 7 packet information.

Server farms are groups of load-balanced devices. Server farms that are represented as virtual servers can improve scalability and availability of services for your network. You can add new servers and remove failed or existing servers at any time without affecting the virtual server's availability.

Clients connect to the CSM directing their requests to the virtual IP (VIP) address of the virtual server. When a client initiates a connection to the virtual server, the CSM chooses a real server (a physical device that is assigned to a server farm) for the connection based on configured load-balancing algorithms and policies (access rules). Policies manage traffic by defining where to send client connections.

Sticky connections limit traffic to individual servers by allowing multiple connections from the same client to stick (or attach) to the same real server using source IP addresses, source IP subnets, cookies, and the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) or by redirecting these connections using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) redirect messages.

These sections describe the CSM:

•Features

•Front Panel Description

•CSM Operation

•CSM Traffic Flow

Features

This software release contains feature sets supporting CSM functionality from previous releases. The tables in this section list these feature sets.

Table 1-1 lists the new CSM features in this release.

Table 1-1 New CSM Feature Set Description 

Features New in this Release
Description

Server Application State Protocol (SASP)

Allows the CSM to receive traffic weight recommendations from Workload Managers (WMs), to register with WMs and enable WMs to suggest new load balancing group members to the CSM.


Table 1-2 lists the CSM features available in this release and previous releases.

Table 1-2 CSM Feature Set Description 

Features
Supported Hardware

Supervisor 1A with MSFC and PFC

Supervisor 2 with MSFC and PFC

Supervisor 720—requires CSM software release 3.1(4) or later

Supported Protocols

TCP load balancing

UDP generic IP protocol load balancing

Special application-layer support for FTP and the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP)

Layer 7 Functionality

Full regular expression matching

URL, cookie switching, Generic HTTP header parsing, HTTP method parsing

Miscellaneous Functionality

VIP connection watermarks

Backup (sorry server) and server farm

Optional port for health probes

IP reassembly

TCL (Toolkit Command Language) scripting

XML configuration interface

SNMP

GSLB (Global Server Load Balancing)-requires a license

Resource usage display

Configurable idle and pending connection timeout

Idle timeout for unidirectional flows

STE integration for SSL load balancing

Real server names

TCP connection redundancy for all types of flows (TCP, UDP, and IP)

Fault tolerant show command enhancements

IOS SLB FWLB interoperation (IP reverse-sticky)

Multiple CSMs in a chassis

CSM and IOS-SLB functioning simultaneously in a chassis

Configurable HTTP 1.1 persistence (either all GETs are made to the same server or are balanced to multiple servers)

Fully configurable NAT

Server-initiated connections

Route health injection

Load-balancing Algorithms

Round-robin

Weighted round-robin (WRR)

Least connections with slow-start enable for real servers.

Weighted least connections

URL hashing

Source IP hashing (configurable mask)

Destination IP hashing (configurable mask)

Source and destination IP hashing (configurable mask)

Load Balancing Supported

Server load balancing (TCP, UDP, or generic IP protocols)

Firewall load balancing

DNS load balancing

Stealth firewall load balancing

Transparent cache redirection

Reverse proxy cache

SSL off-loading

VPN-IPSec load balancing

Generic IP devices and protocols

Stickiness

Cookie sticky with configurable offset and length

SSL ID

Source IP (configurable mask)

HTTP redirection

Redundancy

Sticky state

Full stateful failover (connection redundancy)

Health Checking

HTTP

ICMP

Telnet

TCP

FTP

SMTP

DNS

Return error-code checking

Inband health checking

User-defined TCL scripts

Management

SNMP traps

Full SNMP and MIB support

XML interface for remote CSM configuration

Back-end encryption support.

Workgroup Manager Support

Server Application State Protocol (SASP)


Front Panel Description

Figure 1-1 shows the CSM front panel.

Figure 1-1 Content Switching Module Front Panel

Note The RJ-45 connector is covered by a removable plate.

Status LED

When the CSM powers up, it initializes various hardware components and communicates with the supervisor engine. The Status LED indicates the supervisor engine operations and the initialization results. During the normal initialization sequence, the status LED changes from off to red, orange, and green.

Note For more information on the supervisor engine LEDs, refer to the Catalyst 6500 Series Switch Module Installation Guide.

Table 1-3 describes the Status LED operation.

Table 1-3 Content Switching Module Status LED 

Color
Description

Off

•The module is waiting for the supervisor engine to provide power.

•The module is not online.

•The module is not receiving power, which could be caused by the following:

–Power is not available to the CSM.

–Module temperature is over the limit1 .

Red

•The module is released from reset by the supervisor engine and is booting.

•If the boot code fails to run, the LED stays red after power up.

Orange

•The module is initializing hardware or communicating with the supervisor engine.

•A fault occurred during the initialization sequence.

•The module has failed to download its Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) on power up but continues with the remainder of the initialization sequence and provides the module online status from the supervisor engine.

•The module has not received module online status from the supervisor engine. This problem could be caused by the supervisor engine detecting a failure in an external loopback test that it issued to the CSM.

Green

•The module is operational; the supervisor engine has provided module online status.

Green to orange

•The module is disabled through the supervisor engine CLI 2 using the set module disable mod command.

1 Enter the show environment temperature mod command to display the temperature of each of four sensors on the CSM.

2 CLI = command-line interface.


RJ-45 Connector

The RJ-45 connector, which is covered by a removable plate, is used to connect a management station device or a test device. This connector is used by field engineers to perform testing and to obtain dump information.

CSM Operation

Clients and servers communicate through the CSM using Layer 2 and Layer 3 technology in a specific VLAN configuration. (See Figure 1-2.) In a simple Server Load Balancing (SLB) deployment, clients connect to the client-side VLAN and servers connect to the server-side VLAN. Servers and clients can exist on different subnets. Servers can also be located one or more Layer 3 hops away and connect to the CSM through routers.

A client sends a request to one of the module's VIP addresses. The CSM forwards this request to a server that can respond to the request. The server then forwards the response to the CSM, and the CSM forwards the response to the client.

When the client-side and server-side VLANs are on the same subnets, you can configure the CSM in single subnet (bridge) mode. For more information, see the "Configuring the Single Subnet (Bridge) Mode" section on page 2-1.

When the client-side and server-side VLANs are on different subnets, you can configure the CSM to operate in a secure (router) mode. For more information, see the "Configuring the Secure (Router) Mode" section on page 2-4.

You can set up a fault-tolerant configuration in either the secure (router) or single subnet (bridged) mode using redundant CSMs. For more information, see the "Configuring Fault Tolerance" section on page 7-1.

Single subnet (bridge) mode and secure (router) mode can coexist in the same CSM with multiple VLANs.

Figure 1-2 Content Switching Module and Servers

CSM Traffic Flow

This section describes how the traffic flows between the client and server in a CSM environment. (See Figure 1-3.)

Figure 1-3 Traffic Flow Between Client and Server

Note The numbers in Figure 1-3 correspond to the steps in the following procedure.

When you enter a request for information by entering a URL, the traffic flows as follows:

1. You enter a URL. (Figure 1-3 shows www.example.com as an example.)

2. The client contacts a DNS server to locate the IP address associated with the URL.

3. The DNS server sends the IP address of the virtual IP (VIP) to the client.

4. The client uses the IP address (CSM VIP) to send the HTTP request to the CSM.

5. The CSM receives the request with the URL, makes a load-balancing decision, and selects a server.

For example, in Figure 1-3, the CSM selects a server (X server) from the www.example.com server pool, replacing its own VIP address with the address of the X server (directed mode), and forwards the traffic to the X server. If the NAT server option is disabled, the VIP address remains unchanged (dispatch mode).

6. The CSM performs Network Address Translation (NAT) and eventually TCP sequence numbers translation.