Everyone,
Most of you have much more experience with the Cisco WAAS platform than I do. I have inherited this WAAS platform since joining this company and we had an issue with some websites malfunctioning on port 443 when the Blue Coat proxy traffic passed through the WAVE AppNav cluster in our Data Center. How it works is that all the MPLS traffic, including the Blue Coat proxy traffic, get redirected via WCCP to the Wave AppNav cluster in the WAN VDC and then the proxy traffic will be redirected via WCCP to the Blue Coat proxies in the Internet VDC (two completely different contexts doing WCCP traffic redirection and the Service Groups are also different numbers (61/62 for WAVE and 66 for Blue Coat)). We excluded the Blue Coat proxies' IP addresses from the WCCP redirection for the Wave AppNav cluster in the WAN VDC and everything works fine now. The former network architect for this company stated the following:
" The Blue Coat proxy traffic should not have been put into WAN acceleration at all. Putting the Blue Coat Proxy traffic into WaaS changed the return path of the traffic which was most likely causing the inconsistent results when accessing the websites."
I was wondering if this is correct about Cisco WAAS/Wave devices? I have a lot of experience with SilverPeak WAN accelerators and have allowed the SilverPeak's to accelerate Blue Coat proxy web traffic in the past without any issues; however, I normally do not accelerated SSL web traffic because it is an encrypted protocol and would benefit from the deduplication. I am wondering what are Cisco's WAAS/WAVE best practices for accelerating Blue Coat web proxy traffic - should you accelerate it or not? I was wondering if any of you are accelerating your Blue Coat proxy traffic with your WAAS/WAVE devices? I am also trying to figure out if there is a bug with the current release of Cisco WAAS/Wave code that caused this issue; our WAVE AppNav cluster is currently running the 5.5.1 version of code. Thank you in advance for any advice you can give me about this.
Regards,
John
