WAAS setup Part 1 out of 3

In this 3 part Series I will simply setup a WAAS  infrastructure for two different providers and two different remote sites connecting to one data center.  WAAS is a great Wan accelerator created by Cisco.  The way we have everything setup here is that each remote site has a WAAS module built into the ISR(integrated service router) Which traffic we specify will be redirected to the WAAS for WAN optimization.  For every WAAS deployment you will need atleast two WAAS units.  One WAAS for the remote site and one WAAS in the data which is called the CM(Central Manager) Within a Central Manager it will have all of your WAAS devices where one would manage each of their remote site wan accelerators.  Any WAAS can be a central manager.

I will jump into a full configuration in part 2 and 3.  The basic way it works is traffic is intercepted from the router transparently then redirected into the WAAS back to the router and out the WAN.  The interesting part is that packet is then received at the router in the data center where it does the exact same thing.  This information is cached on both sides of the TCP connection.  This is then cached on both WAAS devices so it will never have t o leave the WAN for the exact same data.