Content Switch Initial Setup

[ciscoacs]

hi,

i am extremely new to content switches and we have bought 2x 11503 to sit infront of our webservers to make them perform better. i have been on the course 3 months ago but have no actual experience.

i have a few questions.

1. we have not bought any ethernet modules and these only come with the csm provided. would anyone suggest we leave it like this and just plug in an sfm module or should we buy ethernet modules for the servers?

2. should we sit the css behind our firewall and in one of our dmz's?

3. our websites currently have registered addresses that people use to get to our site. should these then become our vip address for the content switch?therefore the switch would then have say 4 vip addresses one for each of our 4 websites, then create the many different services required off these?

thanks for any help

sam

[stevehall]

Sam,

Let me take those one at a time...

1. you can use the gig ports on the SCM, which is in module 1. If you can't use those fiber ports, then a FE module would be needed.

2. Typically the CSS is behind a firewall, off a DMZ interface. The servers are then behind the CSS. Of course, I have seen people get "creative" with the topologies, but my description is very typical.

3. the domain name to the site (www.site.com for ex.) should now resolve to the VIP address in the content rule. This could mean changing the IP of the server and moving that IP to the CSS, or creating a new IP for the VIP and updating DNS with the change.

Hope that helps. Let me know if there are further questions...

-Steve

[ciscoacs]

thanks for the clarification

sam