Ken,

Generally I would recommend interception with either WCCP or a L4-7 load balancer like ACE/ACE Appliance/CSM. Both of these are considered best practice for DC deployments as they both can handle high amounts of traffic, can handle WAEs going offline and can load balance many WAEs in a cluster. WCCP might be slightly more flexible where and how you can deploy it.

Both of the following interception techniques are not recommended for data centers, but I list just as FYI:

- Inline cards in appliances can be configured in serial to give you high availability, but you don't get load balancing. The second appliance only starts optimizing traffic once the first WAE starts passing traffic through on overload. Inline interception is usually used for remote offices, however it has been deployed in DCs.

- PBR can be configured for high availability with next-hop features, however there is no available load balancing. The first WAE has to fail completely and then a second WAE can come into play. Overloaded traffic is not optimized at all.

Hope that helps,

Dan