Cisco WAAS Exposed!

“Warning! Do Not Deploy WAN Acceleration Until You Read Every Word Of This Controversial Report”

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Man 1: Right.

Man 2: And I want to clear up something though because often we think the reason we optimize and do this type of thing is so we can improve the user experience that’s not at the data center, right?

So the idea the better we get at this allows us to centralize more applications, so it begins to sound like we centralize everything, but obviously you can’t centralize everything, right?

Man 1: Right.

Man 2: This is where we start looking at other technologies.

Man 3: And Davis 4.1 introduces another feature, what we call the virtual blade. So now the story is complete. With WAAS 4.1, you can centralize everything you can and you could virtualize at the branch what you must.

Users may need a local to main controller. They definitely need a DHP server. They need a DNS server. They need a local print server. Well, with WAAS and Windows server on Cisco WAAS, we can now provide all of these locally while centrally managed.

Man 4: Let’s go to the lab.

Man 2: I want to see how this works. Can we go to your lab?

Man 3: Bear with me real quick. Before we kind of get started on this gnome, I definitely want to make sure that the folks actually get a chance to see the products and stuff. So on the desk here we actually have a 274 in the rack.

I also want to give a shout out to the folks at ABC that actually give us this really cool rack for the set.

Man 1: I love that rack.

Man 3: This rack is the stuff.

Man 1: That rack rocks!

Man 3: I love this rack. Anyway I know we’re not talking about this on the show, but man, I could really get into it. Then we also have, rack mounted in here, we have the 474 and the 574 as well. What are the differences between the two?

Man 4: These are three new appliances that we are introducing next week. They are not WAE’s, White Area Application Engines. They’re actually WAVE, waves. They are White Area Virtualization Engines. They allow you to run both WAAS and Virtual Blades on the same box.

Man 3: That’s pretty cool.

Man 4: The idea here is that I go with one of these boxes into a branch office and I could replace older equipment, older servers and what not and put one device. Get one service contract from Microsoft and Cisco to provide this box. Get Cisco to provide me Level I and Level II support for the Microsoft installation and obviously Level III support for everything else Cisco.

Man 1: So with the exception of a switch, all you have at the branch potentially is just your router and your WAVE device.

Man 4: And a WAVE device.

Man 3: Wait a minute, though, because you said something pretty important that’s important for folks at a branch office because these branch offices are way out everywhere. So I can call Cisco and get support on the Microsoft stuff inside here?

Man 4: Absolutely. So this hardware is certified under Microsoft’s program, and when you run Microsoft services on it, you don’t have to duplicate the issue if it happens on a real hardware.

Man 3: So me how it works man. This is too cool.

Man 4: All right.

Man 3: That’s pretty slick.

Man 1: So as we said before we also revamped the GUI. When you log into the GUI, it is now set in drawers with different actions, different drawers for different tasks. OK? You get obviously immediately a view of your network. You could see traffic mix. You could see reduction volume. You can do applications.

You can actually customize this GUI and you could use what we call RDOC, roll based access control, to actually limit users to do different things. So I can create a Virtual Blade, for example.

Man 4: I could become a revenue center for the apartment.

Man 3: Yeah, almost.

Man 4: You need a little more access?

Man 3: It’s almost like a built-in package center.

Man 4: Right. So you can create different roles for different users and actually separate the administration of the Virtual Blade from the network admin.

Man 3: That’s pretty cool. That’s actually really cool.

Man 4: And not only that, but it is truly a one click deployment in terms of the Virtual Blade. Let me show you.

Man 3: There’s no way.

Man 4: So here is my device. I can take a look at the device statistics. I can take a look at the health. Then I would go down to my administration page. I can see that my virtualization resources are enabled.

I can now go to Virtual Blades. I have already one Virtual Blade running, but I’m going to create a new one. I’m going to give it a number. I’m going to give it a description: tech wise. TV-1.

Man 1: Every customer calls it that.

Man 4: Yeah, why not? I’m going to auto start it. I’m going to tell it the image is on disc, and for that, I’m just going to take a look really quickly here on #2 and basically copy the same one so I don’t forget where it is.

Man 3: This image is stored on this Blade from the factory?

Man 4: Exactly right. So if you order the WAVE with WAAS, the VB license and WOW, what we call Windows server on WAAS, you get it all prepackaged and it’s all ready to go.

Basically all you have to do is provision the Virtual Blade and I’m going to give it 30 gig of disc and I’m going to give it one gig of RAM which is plenty, and I’m going to add a network interface. I’m just going to call it Net-1.

I’m going to generate a Mac address. Now this Mac address is unique for this set up, so the central manager has a pre-allocated pool for this prefix and just generates the last three octytes, so these are MAC addresses unique for this deployment. Guarantees from MAC duplication, right? I’m going to edit and I’m going to submit.

Man 1: I thought we were going to have a WAVE when we deployed these.

Man 3: Well, that would have been kind of cool wouldn’t it?

Man 4: That is it. Now I can take a look and see here my Virtual Blade. Now I’m going to go to actions. Actions allows me now to look at my configuration. So it tells me: here is my overall configuration for Virtual Blades. I’ve got two gigs, one available. I’ve got two Virtual Blades; one is running, one is stopped. OK?

Man 3: That’s on David’s machine now.

Man 4: Yeah. Now I’m going to go to Virtual Blade One, and I’m going to start it. I’m going to go to pending and request and send. With that I’m going to use VNC to monitor the installation.

Within seven minutes, I’ll have my installation complete. We don’t have to wait. As I said before, I already configured one Virtual Blade and it’s running.

Man 3: OK, so do you have a baked image here?

Man 4: I do have a baked image. I have an image that I installed last night. It is Windows server 2008 standard core edition. It’s GUI-less, and as such, it provides you some benefits such as higher security or less of an attack surface because of no GUI, no applications running on top of it.

It is managed through a CLI with different set up scripts that some of them will be supplied pro-bono from Cisco and others will be supplied by Advanced Services. So if you get engaged with Advanced Services, part of the added value are going to be some heavy duty set up scripts for the core server.

Man 3: That’s cool! That’s awesome!

Man 4: As I said, less surface attack, less patching. It is managed remotely through either MMC, Microsoft Management Console, from the user desk top or some of the other more sophisticated management tools that Microsoft has. Server Management and Configuration Management Servers and stuff like …