Troubleshooting guide

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Cisco Wide Area Application Services Configuration Guide
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Chapter 1 Planning Your WAAS Network
Checklist for Planning Your WAAS Network
• Mesh deployments—In a mesh deployment, any location may host both clients and servers and the
clients may access any number of local or remote servers.
• Hierarchical deployments—In a hierarchical deployment, the servers are located in multiple
regional, national data centers and are accessed by the different clients. The connections between
the data centers are of higher bandwidth than the connections to the branch offices.
The deployments are characterized according to the WAAS element connections, which follow the
client-server access pattern and may differ from the physical network links. For more information, see
Chapter 1, “Introduction to Cisco WAAS.”
Planning Checklist
When you are planning your WAAS network, use the following checklist as a guideline. As the following
checklist indicates, you can break the planning phase into the following three main categories of
planning activities:
• Sizing phase
• Planning for management
• Planning for application optimization
Note Although there are some interdependencies, you do not need to complete all of the steps in a particular
planning phase before you start the next step.
To plan your network, follow these guidelines:
1. Complete the sizing phase that includes the following tasks:
• Determine which locations in your existing network require WAAS optimization (for example,
which branch offices and data centers).
• Determine if you are going to use a traditional WAAS deployment model or the AppNav deployment
model. For more information on AppNav, see Chapter 1, “Configuring AppNav.”
• Determine the number and models of the WAAS devices that are required for each location. Some
key factors in this selection process is the WAN bandwidth, the number of users, and the expected
use. Various hardware configurations are possible (for example, different hard disk models and
RAM size). Consider running a cluster of WAEs where additional scalability and or failover is
required. For more information, see the “Calculating the Number of WAAS Devices Needed”
section on page 1-18.
• Verify that you have purchased sufficient licenses to cover your needs.
2. Plan for management as follows:
• Complete site and network planning (for example, obtain the IP and routing information including
IP addresses and subnets, routers and default gateway IP addresses, and the hostnames for the
devices). See the “Checklist of WAAS Network System Parameters” table in the Cisco Wide Area
Application Services Quick Configuration Guide.
• Determine the login authentication and login authorization methods (for example, external
RADIUS, TACACS+, Windows domain servers) and accounting policies that you want your WAAS
Central Managers and WAEs to use. For more information, see Chapter 1, “Configuring
Administrative Login Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting.”