WAAS and Citrix Best Practice Configuration

[pmccubbin]

Please correct me if I am off base as I am new to the technology.

As a Best Practice, is it suggested that the the compression and encryption that Citrix does by default be turned off in order to receive the most benefit from WAAS and the WAE appliances? Thanks!

[pmccubbin]

I found my answer in the documentation:

The Cisco WAAS default policy includes a policy to apply the full suite of optimizations to Citrix ICA traffic. Although Cisco WAAS can optimize Citrix, additional performance improvement can be gained by configuring the Citrix server for login encryption only (no session encryption) and no compression. Cisco WAAS advanced compression (DRE and persistent LZ) provide far better compression levels than can be realized with native Citrix compression.

My question now is does turning off the session encryption violate any HIPPA requirements?

Thanks!

[kmball]

Our initial testing did not show a significant improvement. I was wondering if you have any hard numbers for reduction?

[chris.humphries]

According to the Cisco Whitepaper performance is supposed to be improved.

We have done testing with Citrix as well and have seen no improvement. Infact citrix compression performed better than the WAAS compression. Has anyone seen improved performance with Citrix??

[Zach Seils]

Chris,

What version of WAAS are you testing with? Are you testing WAAS with Citrix encryption disabled?

Thanks,

Zach

[chris.humphries]

We are running WAAS version 4.0.7 and Citrix encryption is disabled.

[rm2017]

Zach - Does Cisco have any performance data with Citrix being accelerated by WAAS?

[Zach Seils]

See:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/contnetw/ps5680/ps6870/prod_white_paper0900aecd8051d5ce.html

and

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/contnetw/ps5680/ps6870/prod_case_study0900aecd8069d069.pdf

Zach