ACE 4710 configuration question

[carl.arce]

Dear experts,

I have to configure two ACE 4710 in high availability. The customer pak includes:

ACE-4710-BAS-2PAK 2 Units of ACE 4710 Hardware-1Gbps-1K SSL-100MbpsComp-5VC

ACE-AP-SW-3.2

ACE-AP-BAS-LIC

This is my first time working with ACE, my experience is only with Cisco switches and routers. The customer want to use the ACE only for LB (load balancing), not for FW or other features. As far I know they will use Routed Mode. Anyobody have an example or guide how to config this pair of boxes? I was reading lot of Cisco pdf regarding the ACEs 4710 but I'm getting confused with lot of information. Any help will be welcomed.

[dinesh.thathanath]

Attached Document from Cisco will answer all your questions.

HTH,

Dinesh

[rschulti]

Hi Carl,

You're not telling what protocol (application) needs to be balanced so that makes it a bit harder to answer your question.

But configuration can be done using the following steps:

Configure L2/L3 and Admin access:

ACE communicates using VLANs. Best option is to (port)channelize the 4 ethernet ports to the switch carrying your client-vlan (L3 vlan) and server-vlan (L2 only!). You also assign a fault tollerant vlan (FT-vlan) which is used by ACE to replicate sessions and for configuration synchronisation. You will need to configure this with both ACE Admin contexts. Configure ACE to accept traffic towards the ACE (for management etc.

And next you may want to set up a user context and configure this one for your loadbalancing. Don't forget to allow traffic using an access-list (else implicit deny all...)

Attched are a few examples for both ACE's (redundant) where I did not use port-channel connectivity however. These confs show Web (HTTP and HTTPS) using persistence (sticky), FTP and Telnet LAB-examples

Please let me know if you still have questions.

[carl.arce]

Hi Richard,

Thanks for your answer.

The customer is asking to load balance 3 server farms: two of them using HTTP/TCP and SOAP/TCP and the last one to balance ORACLE RAC. Could you tell me if your examples.zip will be usefull under this scenario? Any help will be welcomed. Do I need to disable all the other features on the pair of ACE and leave the SLB alive alone?