WAAS Application Requests - Process Question

[zookeepa3]

Non Technical Process Question

We all have forms we have our users complete when a firewall rule or change is needed.  You may even have a similiar documents for when load balancers or DNS changes are required.  Does anyone have document they can share that outlines what pieces of information are needed for intergrating applications into WAAS?  What about ongoing changes?

Source, destination and TCP port information is really a very small portion of the what needed to maintain a clean a defined methodolgy within the WAAS manager.  Does anyone have an example or can describe how you collect the initial information to set up WAAS but how do you keep track of changes that may be needed as the application charaterics change or the server farm expands horizontally?

Thanks - Sam

[zookeepa3]

Anyone? 

Anyone from the Cisco WAAS product group?

I get every company is different but someone out there has developed an application on-boarding process.  Without it short/long term the impact to reporting, tracking and customer impact would be impossible to maintain.  In a perfect world Cisco would provide a template for the above.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[chbock]

Sam,

the general answer for detailed information on how to configure WAAS for certain applications is described here:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/app_ntwk_services/waas/waas/v501/configuration/guide/policy.html

In general, WAAS comes preconfigured for the most widly used applications in the industry.

In order to understand, which configuration is necessary for a new application, one needs to understand the basic options WAAS offers.

These are two options:

1) Use an Application Optimizer (AO) if you need some dedicated protocol know how. ( e.g. (e)MAPI, CIFS, SSL, HTTP, ICA, to name some)

2) Generic TCP traffic is optimized using TCP Flow Optimization (TFO), Data Redundancy Elemination (DRE) and Lempe Liv (LZ) compression.

The in terms of processes, the question is:

1) Is there a policy preconfigured for the new application?

     a) yes

          If an AO is used, does the AO need configuration? ( example: SSL AO requires certificates)

          Do we have specialities which require further fine tuning? ( Answer is mostly: no, Example: non-standard ports)

     b) no

          You define what you need for the application based on the protocol characteristics.

          If you have defined these characteristics you can choose one of the AOs, or define which of the "generic" options fit the traffic. For example, for traffic that is already compressed, it does not much benefit from LZ, so choosing only TFO and DRE. Another example is traffic that has not much of dublicate data, perhaps it does not benefit a lot from DRE, so you configure TFO only.

Does that answer your question?

Thanks,

chris

[zookeepa3]

Thanks Christian -

I would agree...but what I asking for is an example of the document or template used to ask these questions of our users.  I have a firewall rule request document, I have a DNS change request document, I have a NAT request document, etc....

Do you have a document that you give to your internal application owners whereby you are able to collect the neccessary information to define that application in WAAS?  If so, Can you share it?

Thanks

[chbock]

Hi Sam,

I dont' have such a document out of the box, but could develop it with your help.

If you could send me samples of your request documents for firewall etc., I could tune it to fit WAAS.

Thanks,

chris