Troubleshooting guide

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Cisco Wide Area Application Services Configuration Guide
OL-26579-01
Chapter 1 Configuring Application Acceleration
About Application Acceleration
You can use the WAAS Central Manager GUI to modify the predefined policies and to create additional
policies for other applications. For more information on creating optimization policies, see the “Creating
a New Traffic Optimization Policy” section on page 1-49. For more information on viewing reports,
restoring policies, monitoring applications, and other functions, see the “Managing Application
Acceleration” section on page 1-55.
Note All application definitions configured in the WAAS Central Manager are globally applied to all WAAS
devices that register with the WAAS Central Manager, regardless of the device group membership
configuration.
WAAS policies can apply two kinds of optimizations to matched traffic:
• Layer 4 optimizations that include TFO, DRE, and LZ compression. These features can be applied
to all types of TCP traffic.
• Layer 7 optimizations that accelerate application-specific protocols. The application accelerators
control these kinds of optimizations.
For a given optimization policy, the DRE feature can use different caching modes (beginning with
software version 4.4.1):
• Bidirectional—The peer WAEs maintain identical caches for inbound and outbound traffic. This
caching mode is best suited where a significant portion of the traffic seen in one direction between
the peers is also seen in the reverse direction. In software versions prior to 4.4.1, this mode is the
only supported caching mode.
• Unidirectional—The peer WAEs maintain different caches for inbound and outbound traffic. This
caching mode is best suited where a significant portion of the traffic seen in one direction between
the peers is not seen in the reverse direction.
• Adaptive—The peer WAEs negotiate either bidirectional or unidirectional caching based on the
characteristics of the traffic seen between the peers.
The predefined optimization policies are configured to use the optimal DRE caching mode, depending
on the typical application traffic, though you can change the mode if you want.