DFSR or DFS-R not being accelerated on WAAS

[Natalie Ramirez]

We would like to be able to run backups only in our primary datacenter.  So we are replicating 150 gigabytes of data across a 1.5Mbps link.  This process should take a little less than 2 weeks to replicate the data.  We have a Cisco WAAS 274 in this location.

Now, optomized traffic is greater than original traffic while we are running this replication.  There are multiple connections taking place, it appears that the DFS-R protocol, opens a connection, sends a single file, then closes that connection, opening a new connection for the next file it is sending.

There are multiple (Four to Seven) connections from the DC to the remote site server on port 1330 and one to two connections from the remote server to the DC on port 57327.

The remote site server is Windows 2003 R2 the DC server is 2008.  There is a setting in 2008 to NOT compress the data, but I do not see a setting in 2003 to not compress the data.  It is showing up as TDL acceleration, but I am thinking I need to remove DRE from this accleration, possibly LZ as well.  I do not think I want to put it as pass through.  I can not seem to find a best practices for this and would appreciate any assistance you could give me.

I will go ahead and configure a policy for TCP Optomization and LZ compression.  And see how that goes.  If you have any advise on this, your comments would be greatly appreciated.

[Nicolas Fournier · Accepted solution]

Hi Beau,

Here is what I've found on DFSR traffic otimized by WAAS:

DFS-R is using Remote Differential Compression (RDC), so the benefit from DRE+LZ 
should be minimal, if any.  TFO may still provide somebenefit, 
depending on the WAN characteristics.

So it seems that your assumptions were correct and that the right policy would be TFO only for this type of traffic.

Regards,

Nicolas

[Natalie Ramirez]

That is exactly what I ended up doing, a policy labeled DFSR, with destination start ports 1330 and 57327, with the "Replication" application group, so it will show up as "replication" data in the graph as opposed to "other-data"

With TFO only, it is still showing the Optomized data as being slightly greater than the Original data, which is better than how it was with DRE enabled and it was showing Optomized as being 20%+ greater than Original Data.  I tried it as Pass-through, but then I had latency issues.  TFO only is the best option.

Also, in DFSR, I was able to find a setting to completly remove the Compression, but there is no way (at the present time) to remove the Encryption.