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tinman_40165's avatar
tinman_40165
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Aug 26, 2011

Load Balancing Blue Coat Wan Opt solution for Datacentre

Hi Devcentral guru's.

 

 

I have a customer who's been using F5 for a number of years and they recently bought Blue Coat Wan Optimisation for around 90 or so sites. (baked off against Riverbed and Cisco).

 

 

 

As an afterthought, they asked me whether they could use an F5 which is already inpath with traffic at the datacentre to load balance Blue Coat ADN Wan optimisation traffic coming in from all the branches.

 

 

 

They are looking at specifically using Blue Coat to accelerate Exchange traffic from Outlook client to Exchange server and wanted to know whether we can load balance that.

 

 

 

 

 

For reference, Blue Coat can operate in transparent mode (preserving Client IP, Dest Port, Dest IP),

 

in Explicit mode where traffic will be destined for a single IP address with all traffic running on 3034-3036.

 

Or in Translucent mode where dest port is preserved, but all traffic is destined for a single IP.

 

 

 

If someone has done any load balancing of Blue Coat ADN Wan Optimised traffic (not web caching), i'd be interested to see how it worked and any gotcha's.

 

 

 

Cheers.

 

Tinman

 

config
design
  • The_Bhattman's avatar
    The_Bhattman
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Aug 29, 2011
    Hi Tinman,

     

    I spoke to one of my colleagues had something like this set up for several companies. He doesn't single out a specific WAN vendor but his his only recommendation is to use an active/passive configuration and avoid trying to load balance on optimization appliance. The primary reason is that WAN optimization appliance tend to continually analyze the traffic itself to make themselves as efficient as possible. Thus if the F5 load balance or any load balancer can obfuscate data that the WAN Optimized Appliance may rely on to be efficient. He also mentioned not to optimize the traffic from the LTM perspective - much akin to not running 2 Desktop/laptop firewall applications on the same system.

     

     

    I hope this helps

     

    Bhattman