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Process for Adding Additional WAE to 4.0.11 Cluster with CIFS

mlouis
Level 1
Level 1

I will be adding an additional WAE 612 W/ 4GB of memory to an existing single WAE 612/4GB cluster in the future. What is the best practice process for adding the second WAE to the cluster. I would like to do the WCCP configuration last. Whats the easiest way to move the policies from the existing WAE to the second wae. Is it as simple as just creating a Cluster Device Group and then adding both devices to the group. Will the second WAE inherit the settings for WAFS as well? I am not concerned about the WAAS setup.

I don't have access to the credentials for the CIFS connection on the core WAE today so i would really like to know if i can complete this install by just copying settings from the existing WAE using the device group settings.

I am also going to reverse the 61 and 62 settings to ensure that the inbound client connections get load balanced across the WAE properly.

Any other things to consider?

Thanks in advance

Mike

3 Replies 3

dstolt
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

Mike,

Either configure the 2nd WAE exactly the same or migrate your settings to a Device Group (recommended) so they are both configured the same. Add the core WAFS service (reload required) and you are ready to add it to the cluster.

You should already have a core WAFS cluster device group, so you would just add the WAE to the cluster and it will be ready to start accepting CIFS tunnel sessions. Most of your current edges will still talk to the old core, however new ones can start talking to the new core or if the other core has connectivity issues, the edges will move to the new core. In 4.0.11, you have to do this on the Central Manager.

Once you reverse and add the WCCP configs, you can also start optimizing TCP traffic as well.

Dan

Dan,

Thanks for the feedback.

What about the load balancing of cifs across both cores. Could I setup both cores and then bounce the edges. Would they then load balance across the new core or will they always nail up to the same core unless that core is unavailable. The main reason we are adding this second core is to maintain a proper fanout ratio with respect to WAFS.

What would be the behavior if we bounced the edges after installing the second core and putting 61 on the wan and 62 on the LAN side?

Thanks

Mike

dstolt
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

Mike,

The edges will always reconnect to the same core unless it's not available. In 4.0.x, WCCP does not effect CIFS connections (4050 connections), only load balancing the TCP connections outside the 4050 connections. I have manually load balanced edges before via expert mode on the edge GUI, but it's fairly unwieldy. How many edges do you have? I can dig up the procedure if you want to use it.

You can get decent load balancing by setting up both cores so they are both taking edge connections, take the old core offline (stopping the service in the GUI) for several minutes and then bringing it back up. A good number of your edges should now be on the new core and some will still be on the old core.

Also, remember it's best practice to try and keep N+1 at your core. If you loose a core WAE in your cluster and a single Core can't handle the CIFS traffic, you will continue to get CIFS optimization.

Hope that helps,

Dan

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