Solved: Demonstrate WAAS w/ Packet Capture (No hardware)

tom.gill · ‎05-18-2010

I thought I once read something that described a utility to demonstrate Cisco WAAS with real data from a customer's network - without the use of a WAAS appliance (or network module). It would use a packet capture (from Wireshark, etc.) to "play" real traffic through a software tool containing the Cisco WAAS algorithms.

Did I make this up or is it real? I can't seem to locate anything on the Cisco website.

Any help/ideas would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,

Tom

Zach Seils · ‎05-19-2010

Hi Tom,

We offer a utility called TCPreplay that allows you to replay a capture between two hosts. You can do this in the lab with WAAS in between the hosts to determine the potential benefits you would see. However, this does require that you have WAAS devices to test with. Here is more information:

TCPreplay

TCPreplay is a free tool provided by Cisco (with no warranty or support) that allows two nodes to 'replay' an Ethereal/libpcap capture while each are emulating one of the nodes in the conversation. The power of TCPreplay is that, with a pre-captured network trace file, a capture file can be replayed in an isolated network where Cisco WAAS is deployed. This allows you to see the impact Cisco WAAS has on the application traffic that is captured in the capture file. TCP replay shows statistics about total time to completion, packets per second, and overall throughput. These numbers should vary as optimizations are applied against the traffic.

TCPreplay has some known caveats:

TCPreplay must be used in an isolated lab environment where Cisco WAAS is deployed
TCPreplay will NOT work if the capture file does NOT contain the three-way handshake
TCPreplay reflects potential benefit from TCP generic optimizations (TFO/DRE/LZ) only. WAAS benefit obtained from any of Application Accelerators (AO) can not be measured by the tool.
Nodes participating in a TCPreplay operation must NOT have any of the ports contained within the trace file open locally. For instance, you can not replay web traffic using TCPreplay where one of the nodes involved in the replay is running a local web server instance

TCPreplay can be downloaded from CCO http://www.cisco.com/cgi-bin/tablebuild.pl/fe_util

At one point in time we have a website you could upload the captures to and we would run them through WAAS on the back end. I can't find it right now, so let me do some digging.

Regards,

Zach

View solution in original post

Zach Seils · ‎05-19-2010

Hi Tom,

We offer a utility called TCPreplay that allows you to replay a capture between two hosts. You can do this in the lab with WAAS in between the hosts to determine the potential benefits you would see. However, this does require that you have WAAS devices to test with. Here is more information:

TCPreplay

TCPreplay is a free tool provided by Cisco (with no warranty or support) that allows two nodes to 'replay' an Ethereal/libpcap capture while each are emulating one of the nodes in the conversation. The power of TCPreplay is that, with a pre-captured network trace file, a capture file can be replayed in an isolated network where Cisco WAAS is deployed. This allows you to see the impact Cisco WAAS has on the application traffic that is captured in the capture file. TCP replay shows statistics about total time to completion, packets per second, and overall throughput. These numbers should vary as optimizations are applied against the traffic.

TCPreplay has some known caveats:

TCPreplay must be used in an isolated lab environment where Cisco WAAS is deployed
TCPreplay will NOT work if the capture file does NOT contain the three-way handshake
TCPreplay reflects potential benefit from TCP generic optimizations (TFO/DRE/LZ) only. WAAS benefit obtained from any of Application Accelerators (AO) can not be measured by the tool.
Nodes participating in a TCPreplay operation must NOT have any of the ports contained within the trace file open locally. For instance, you can not replay web traffic using TCPreplay where one of the nodes involved in the replay is running a local web server instance

TCPreplay can be downloaded from CCO http://www.cisco.com/cgi-bin/tablebuild.pl/fe_util

At one point in time we have a website you could upload the captures to and we would run them through WAAS on the back end. I can't find it right now, so let me do some digging.

Regards,

Zach