Revision as of 11:01, 6 June 2015

Quick Start Guide – VMware

WAN OPTIMIZATION VIRTUAL APPLIANCE – VMWARE

It is recommended to use the OVA package to create the wan optimization virtual appliance. When using the VMDK file steps 1-3 from this guide is required.

By default Wanos runs in bridge or switch mode. In this back to back lab example, theoretically no configuration is required on the wan optimization appliance to test optimization. In other words, it is plug and play, as long as the wan0 and lan0 are plugged into the correct networks.

QUICK START GUIDE STEPS

1. After downloading and extracting the virtual appliance files, create a new Linux Virtual Machine. Select “Install Operating System” later and use fixed disk space. Configure a minimum of 2 GB memory for a point to point deployment and 4 GB for a MultiSite network.
2. Once the Virtual Appliance has been created, edit the default settings before attempting to boot. Remove the default SCSI drive and add a new SATA or IDE drive. Use an existing virtual hard drive and select the wanos.vmdk file.
3. VMware Workstation or Player: Change the first interface to bridge mode and add a second network interface to bridge. Use the virtual network editor to map the physical interfaces to virtual interfaces. When in a lab scenario, use “Lan Segment 1″ for the second interface on the server side device. This will simulate the WAN link. On the second device use “Lan Segment 1″ to connect to the WAN and “Lan Segment 2″ to connect to a workstation to simulate a branch user. When cloning a virtual machine, select ‘regenerate mac address’.VMware ESX/ESXi: See the virtual lab and the vSwitch Guide for more advance VMware vSwitch environments.
4. Save settings and if prompted to convert to the newer format, select yes.
5. Important: Before booting the machine double check that lan0 and wan0 are not connected to the same network to ensure the bridge will not introduce a loop. The wan0 interfaces should connect to the wan network and the lan0 interfaces to the separate lan networks.
6. Boot and verify that this was successful by running ‘ifconfig tun0′ from the command line or opening https://192.168.1.200 from a device on the same IP range. Set the permanent IP address and gateway via the GUI or running the command line utility wanos-cfg from the console. The device uses only a single IP address.

ENABLING OPTIMIZATION

Once traffic starts to flow, each appliance will automatically detect when a peer comes online or goes offline. Peer status can be verified with the Reports -> Peer Status tab. Once a peer is discovered, they automatically start, detect and end the optimized stream. By default optimization is enabled for all TCP traffic. In production use the traffic policies to exclude subnets or protocols if required. To optimize only a specific site, for example if some sites don’t have appliances yet, create a traffic policy to optimize only the required traffic.

TROUBLESHOOTING

‘Peer detected on lan0′ is an indication that the cables are reverse. Use the virtual machine configuration or the “Switch Interface Port Roles” checkbox under “Network Interfaces” to swap the port roles. After final setup, clear the datastores for good measure.

The LAN and WAN interfaces are configured to bridge traffic and have no IP addresses. One network interface should connect to the WAN Router or Firewall or when using VLAN’s the outside VLAN. The second interface needs to connect to the LAN segment or inside VLAN. Together they form a virtual inpath interface. See the Cabling Guide for tips on identifying the lan0 and wan0 interfaces.

A common error occurs when booting the appliance without meeting the minimum of two network interfaces requirement. In this case add the second interface, boot the appliance and reset to factory defaults:

/etc/wanos/clean.sh

Another common error occurs when attaching the wanos.vmdk virtual disk to the default VMware SCSI controller. In this instance Wanos would seem to boot, but the web interface would not respond and ‘fdisk -l’ would produce no output. To resolve, remove the default SCSI controller and attach a new SATA or IDE virtual controller and attached the wanos.vmdk drive. For performance reasons a SCSI drive can be attached as a secondary drive.

HOW TO TEST:

Create a file share via CIFS, FTP or HTTP on the server.

1. Download the files on the server from the test user side machine. Compressible data will receive accelerated throughput on the first transfer. All files, including zipped and executable will receive significant acceleration on the subsequent transfers.
2. Download a new compressed zip file via one protocol. Note the throughput. Upload the same file via a different protocol to test the bidirectional and cross protocol deduplication.
3. Add a new 20 Mb zipped file in the server directory. Extract the file and add another 1 Mb zip file and compress the archive. There should now be one 20 MB zip file and another 21 MB zip file. Download the first file and note the throughput. When downloading the 21 MB file, 20 MB of the data will receive significant acceleration and the remaining 1 MB will be new data.

DEFAULT SETTINGS:

• IP Address: 192.168.1.200/24
• Default Gateway: 192.168.1.1
• Web Username: wanos
• Web Password: wanos
• Console Username: tc
• Console Password: ChangeM3