Cisco WAAS (Wide Area Application Services) reduces the cost of bandwidth spending at branch office and increases the IT productivity. It delivers high scalability and Application performance for distributed enterprises.
Distributed Enterprises with branch office all over the world face lot of challenges in application delivery and critical data exchange between various locations. In this situation, IT manager who is managing the distributed network faces a lot of pressure to reduce application delivery costs over the WAN while ensuring application availability.
The delay/latency of the WAN/Internet link between the data center and the user at the remote site adversely affects the performance of business applications. As a solution to solve this performance overhead, optimizing bandwidth, increase application performance over WAN Cisco WAAS is introduced.
Cisco WAAS:
Cisco WAAS is a Compact, Cost effective, WAN Optimization which accelerates applications, optimizes bandwidth, provides LAN like performance on WAN. Cisco WAAS enables IT infrastructure to achieve following goals:
1. Increasing productivity by reducing the latency on WAN.
2. Reducing the bandwidth consumption.
3.Reducing the operational cost
4. Offering high performance for Business Critical Application.
Architecture Of Cisco WAAS:
Cisco WAAS has a central manager running on Wide Area Applications Engine(WAE), which accelerates bandwidth over WAN. Central manager has information on WAE with their overall compression ratio’s and also application wise. All the reports corresponding to WAE and its groups can be seen at the Central Manager User Interface. The Cisco WAAS Central Manager can be accessed from a web browser, therefore managing these devices is possible from anywhere in the world.
Cisco WAAS monitoring in NetFlow Analyzer:
Unfortunately Cisco WAAS central manager and WAE’s does not support NetFlow export even though they are from Cisco, so monitoring this device using NetFlow technology in NetFlow Analyzer is not a direct possibility. To overcome this overhead, they provide API to access central manager information from third party applications. Using this API, NetFlow Analyzer will be able to support Cisco WAAS monitoring in our latest version NetFlow Analyzer 9.
Configuring WAAS:
The WAAS Module can be configured using “Product Settings” option in the “Admin” tab.
Access to the Cisco WAAS Central Manager is secured and encrypted with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), and users can be authenticated through a local database or a third-party authentication service. In NetFlow Analyzer, the WAAS manager can be configured using the “WAAS Settings” page. In the “WAAS Settings” enter the details of the WAAS Central Manager you want to configure. The NetFlow Analyzer WAAS module supports 4.1.1.1 and versions above of the WAAS Central Manager.
CM Server IP: Specify the IP address of the Central Server you want to configure
CM Server Port: Specify the port number of the WAAS central manager. The Default port number is 8443
CM Server Protocol: The server protocol is either http or https.
CM Server User Name/Password: Provide the admin login credentials of the Central Manager you want to configure.
CM Server Timezone: Mention the current time zone of the Central Manager you would like to configure (Example :- GMT+5).
CM Server Certificate Path: specify the location of the SSL server certificate which should be stored locally in the NetFlow Analyzer server.
Now the Central Manager has been configured. Click ‘Update’ to submit the details of the Central Manager.
WAAS CM server certification Download:
To obtain the SSL server certificate, open the central manager in the desired browser, click on the identity information of the “https” url. Click More Information. In the new pop-up that opens, click “view certificate”. In th certificate viewer that opens, select the “details” tab in and click export to save the certificate as .cer file(WAAS.cer). Now enter the location of this .cer file in the above “CM Server Certificate Path” text box.
Note :-
Once CM server is configured in NetFlow Analyzer, it can not be edited. It has to be deleted and re-added.
NetFlow WAE Device Mapping:
By mapping the NetFlow router name we instruct the WAE on which router to monitor. The mapped routers are monitored by the WAE and the NetFlow generates reports on the compressed and uncompressed data.
NetFlow WAE Application Mapping:
The applications of WAE are mapped with NetFlow Analyzer’s applications for easy monitoring and report generation. This way you can view the optimized amount of traffic and the amount of compressed data for each application.
We will explore WAAS reports in detail in our next blog in this series.
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Praveen Kumar
NetFlow Analyzer Technical Team
