Load Balancing Blue Coat Wan Opt solution for Datacentre
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