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955
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ACE design question/clarification

cmarva
Level 4
Level 4

Just a general question regarding the ACEs.

Currently, a pair of 6509s each with vss720s and an ACE.

Current layout (only one VIP right now, more to come very soon)

is very similar to diagram in cisco document ID 107400, configuring

ACE in routed mode with L7 policies. It seems to me that the design

in this document implies that ALL traffic to and from the real servers

(slb as well as non-slb) traverses the ACE.

My layout is as follows:

One vlan (call it vlan 100) is for VIPs and has L3/hsrp on the msfcs.

Other vlan (call it vlan 101) is for real servers and only exists at layer

2 on the 6509s. The alias IP on interface vlan 101 is the default gateway

for the real servers. I have a static route on the msfc for non-slb traffic and

other traffic directly to the real servers. Real servers are VMs.

The question I have is this - not all traffic that traverses the ACE is

load balance eligible, there will be pass-trhough traffic (non slb eligible)

that traverses the ACE. This does accomplish both forward and reverse

slb traffic traversing the ACE, but with non-slb traffic traversing the ACE,

is this scalable? I guess what I'm worried about paying a performance penalty

knowing that a lot of the traffic isn't slb eligible. I have no problem installing

a license for increased bandwidth.

Any responses/advice/comments are appreciated - chris

5 Replies 5

Gilles Dufour
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

If the non-slb traffic is too important, it is sometimes better to have a one-armed design.

However, one-armed is more complex to implement (snat or policy-map is required).

The ACE resources can be seen with a 'show resource usage'.

Some of the important ones are BW, concurrent-connection, connection rate.

Those will be impacted by non-slb traffic.

Only the BW can be upgraded to 8G or 16G.

The concurrent-connections limit is 4M and the connection rate will vary depending on the load of the box.

Gilles.

Thanks for the reply, I appreciate it.

I did think about trying to fit the load balancing into our

current topology, and unfortunately due to some things

beyond my control, I don't believe that one-armed is an

option (need to see real source IPs, real servers opening

connections back to client, etc). So I believe that the design

as I've outlined is the best way to go, time will tell. But your

response does help and I can definitely monitor better to see

if we will hit any limitations.

If you don't mind, one other question on a completely different

subject. I do have a need to configure ssl termination on a new

VIP. In the ssl guide, under importing certificates, the doc states

that the ACE supports importation of PEM encoded certificates.

In the chapter "displaying certificate information", the docs states

that with the "sho crypto files" command, file formats may be shown

as PEM, DER, or PKCS12. Does this mean that ONLY PEM encoded

certs can be imported? If our server team has ordered a DER encoded

cert already, can that be imported and used for the ssl termination?

Thanks again, I appreciate it - chris

We support only PEM you do a terminal import.

If you use FTP or SFTP to import the key/cert we support PEM, DER and PKCS12.

Gilles.

Gilles,

Thank you, that certainly clears things up.

I appreciate it - chris

Cmarva,

One of my contexts is configured in one arm mode. The ACE has a command that you can enter in the policy-map of the configuration that will insert the original header.

Regards,

John...

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