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WAAS: direct communication between WAE edges without WAE core

snakayama
Level 3
Level 3

Hi everyone,

My customer plan to deploy WAAS with hub-and-spoke environment, that is, one WAE core is in central site and 10 or more WAE edge are in remote sites.

In central site, most of servers exist

In remote sites, a few servers and clients exist

And customer plan to use TCP acceleration/optimization (using DRE cache) and WAFS (using CIFS cache).

My question is, in this hub-and-spoke environment, when TCP and CIFS communication occur from client on one remote site to the server on the other remote site, the TCP and CIFS traffic must be communicate through WAE core ? or TCP and CIFS traffic can be communicated directly between WAE edges without WAE core ?

I personally think, in the case of CIFS traffic, CIFS traffic might be able to communicate directly between WAE edges without WAE core because CIFS cache exist only on WAE edge closed to the client and not exist WAE core (I think WAE core does not have CIFS cache).

And also in the case of TCP traffic, TCP traffic also might be able to communicate directly between WAE edge because each WAE edge might be able to maintain DRE cache.

Would you please let me know your comment of this question.

Your information would be appreciated.

Best regards,

Shinichi

1 Accepted Solution

Accepted Solutions

Gregory Scarlett
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

Short answer - to get CIFS acceleration, you need to configure each branch office WAE that has file servers as a core.

Accelerated CIFS traffic only works in a Core-Edge fashion. If clients at one remote site are accessing files at another remote site, and their both only configured as edges, it will not accelerate. Only Core WAE's wil actually initiate a connection into the file server to retrieve the file the first time.

What will happen is that when the local client makes a request for the server, the local WAE will incercept the request. It will pass it over to the Core WAE and attempt to auto-discover the Server. This will most likely fail, unless the Core has a low enough latency to the actual server, and it will go back to the normal DRE/LZ/TFO optimisation.

You are correct about normal TCP traffic though. As long as the WCCP interception is all setup correctly, the two branch office WAE's will be able to accelerate all other TCP traffic.

View solution in original post

5 Replies 5

Gregory Scarlett
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

Short answer - to get CIFS acceleration, you need to configure each branch office WAE that has file servers as a core.

Accelerated CIFS traffic only works in a Core-Edge fashion. If clients at one remote site are accessing files at another remote site, and their both only configured as edges, it will not accelerate. Only Core WAE's wil actually initiate a connection into the file server to retrieve the file the first time.

What will happen is that when the local client makes a request for the server, the local WAE will incercept the request. It will pass it over to the Core WAE and attempt to auto-discover the Server. This will most likely fail, unless the Core has a low enough latency to the actual server, and it will go back to the normal DRE/LZ/TFO optimisation.

You are correct about normal TCP traffic though. As long as the WCCP interception is all setup correctly, the two branch office WAE's will be able to accelerate all other TCP traffic.

Thank you very much for you easy-to-understand reply.

I understand you said.

Best regards,

Hi,

I read this conversation interestingly and I have an additional question.

When I need to communicate CIFS traffic between remote sites (example site A and B), not through central site, I think I can configure one site (site A) WAE as core and other site (site B) WAE as edge.

If so, there are two WAE cores in the network, one is in central site and other is in remote site (site A).

In the case of the CIFS traffic between remote site (site A) and central site occurred, CIFS traffic is communicated between WAE core (central site) and WAE core (site A).

Can CIFS traffic be communicated from WAE core to WAE core ?

Best regards,

Yoshitaka

Hi Yoshitaka,

In this scenario, the devices will be acting as both Core and Edge, but assigned to different connectivity groups.

In this example, one Connectivity Group will have the Central Site as Core, and each branch as Edges.

You will then setup a second Connectivity Group with Site A as the Core and all other devices as Edge.

There is never any communication directly from Core to Core, or Edge to Edge.

Regards,

Greg Scarlett

APAC TAC Engineer

Thank you very much.

I understand.

Best regards,

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