Cisco ACE 4710 Bridged or Routed

[mohamadesla]

Hi,

My question is regarding ACE 4710 deployment method based on best practices. In the topology shown below, which option is recommended?

Real SERVERs ------- FWSM ------- MSFC

Default gateway of the servers is FWSM IP address and NAT will be configured on the FWSM too, so what is best option to deploy ACE appliance here?

Thanks for your help,

[slambe]

I was under the same question a year ago, with the same scenario.  I placed the 4710s into the same vlan as the server farms, enable sticky-mac and PAT addresses on shared vlan, and used the 4710s in One-Arm mode.  I found that only traffic required to pass through the 4710s actually went through the L/Bs, but traffic not required to pass through did not, thereby saving resources on the L/Bs.