WAAS Application Requests - Process Question

Question

Non Technical Process Question
We all have forms we have our users complete when a firewall rule or change is needed.  You may even have a similiar documents for when load balancers or DNS changes are required.  Does anyone have document they can share that outlines what pieces of information are needed for intergrating applications into WAAS?  What about ongoing changes?
Source, destination and TCP port information is really a very small portion of the what needed to maintain a clean a defined methodolgy within the WAAS manager.  Does anyone have an example or can describe how you collect the initial information to set up WAAS but how do you keep track of changes that may be needed as the application charaterics change or the server farm expands horizontally?
Thanks - Sam

Answer 1

Sam,
the general answer for detailed information on how to configure WAAS for certain applications is described here:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/app_ntwk_services/waas/waas/v501/configuration/guide/policy.html
In general, WAAS comes preconfigured for the most widly used applications in the industry.
In order to understand, which configuration is necessary for a new application, one needs to understand the basic options WAAS offers.
These are two options:
1) Use an Application Optimizer (AO) if you need some dedicated protocol know how. ( e.g. (e)MAPI, CIFS, SSL, HTTP, ICA, to name some)
2) Generic TCP traffic is optimized using TCP Flow Optimization (TFO), Data Redundancy Elemination (DRE) and Lempe Liv (LZ) compression.
The in terms of processes, the question is:
1) Is there a policy preconfigured for the new application?
     a) yes
          If an AO is used, does the AO need configuration? ( example: SSL AO requires certificates)
          Do we have specialities which require further fine tuning? ( Answer is mostly: no, Example: non-standard ports)
     b) no
          You define what you need for the application based on the protocol characteristics.
          If you have defined these characteristics you can choose one of the AOs, or define which of the "generic" options fit the traffic. For example, for traffic that is already compressed, it does not much benefit from LZ, so choosing only TFO and DRE. Another example is traffic that has not much of dublicate data, perhaps it does not benefit a lot from DRE, so you configure TFO only.
Does that answer your question?
Thanks,
chris