WAE not registered question

[marcusbrutus]

Hi Experts,

Just curious.  If I have a newly deployed WAE with default settings but network settings settings configured eg. ip add and gateway ip add, but this WAE is not registered to a central manager, would it still TFO and application optimize?  I have enabled license on the device by doing 'license add Enterprise' and app accelerator shows cifs, mapi, etc running.

Thanks!!

[Bhavin Yadav · Accepted solution]

Hi Marcus,

Yes. WAE will still optimize the traffic, provided it has the default configuration. i.e. default policies are in place.

Central Manager is the management piece to manage configurations for WAE.

The WAAS Central Manager GUI allows administrators to perform the following tasks:

•Configure system and network settings for an individual WAAS device, WAAS Express device, or device group.

•Create and edit application policies that determine the action that a WAAS device performs when it intercepts specific types of traffic.

•Configure file services and set up file preposition policies.

•Create device groups that help you manage and configure multiple WAEs at the same time.

•View detailed reports about the optimized traffic in your WAAS network

More reading here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/app_ntwk_services/waas/waas/v441/configuration/guide/intro.html

Hope this helps.

Regards.

PS: If this answers your question, please mark this as Answered.

[marcusbrutus]

Thanks for the reply Bhavin.

I'm curious though, do you mean that i can simply type 'license add Enterprise' and get the wae box to work without actually installing a license or key on the device itself which is typical of devices/apps? 

[Patrick Moubarak · Accepted solution]

Hi,

As far as I know, Cisco WAAS does not do license verification yet. When you enable the Enterprise license, you are not prompted for a key or a .lic file or anything. Once enabled, application accelerators are enable and the device starts using the default policy.

You can even edit the policy manually in CLI but that's difficult and not recommended.

Cisco recommends to have the same application acceleration policy on all WAE devices.

If the peer WAE on the other end of the connection has different policies, the acceleration will be the lowest of the two; ex.

if FTP traffic is TFO+DRE+PLZ on one WAE and pass-through on the other then passthrough will be applied to the connection.

Hope this helps,

Patrick

[Bhavin Yadav · Accepted solution]

Patrick is right, Marcus. You do not need a *magical* license key to enable Enterprise License / any other license on WAAS.

On the other side, WAE will apply the default policies and you can certainly modify them but it is very tricky and complicated rather than doing it from GUI. However, with that said, you can still do it from CLI on each WAE.

Regards.