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Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) Appliances

Cisco Wide Area Application Services Version 4.0 Optimizations for Microsoft SMS

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Solution Overview

Enterprise IT organizations struggle to maintain service packs, hotfixes, patches, and antivirus definition files for remote workstations and servers. As the workforce grows in an increasingly distributed fashion, distributing installation files and update files to a large number of users becomes cumbersome and consumes large amounts of network capacity. The size and frequency of distribution is also increasing because of the complexity of today's operating systems and breadth of installed applications. Cisco® Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) provides an industry-leading solution to software distribution challenges while also facilitating server and storage centralization and improving application delivery.

OVERVIEW

This document describes how Cisco WAAS Version 4.0 improves performance and facilitates consolidation in software distribution environments using products such as Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS). The Cisco WAAS Version 4.0 Software from Cisco Systems® incorporates WAN optimization and application acceleration technologies that help IT organizations to:

• Consolidate remote-office infrastructure-Migrate costly and difficult-to-manage branch-office components such as file servers, e-mail servers, software distribution servers, storage, and data-protection infrastructure into the data center, thereby enabling significant cost reduction and improved manageability while offering remote users LAN-like access over the WAN.

• Accelerate application protocols-Safely accelerate application protocols such as the Common Internet File System (CIFS) for Windows environments for UNIX environments to provide LAN-like access to centralized file services. Cisco WAAS provides safe data caching, protocol latency reduction, read ahead, and other optimizations to minimize application latency and bandwidth consumption.

• Optimize WAN usage-More intelligently take advantage of WAN capacity, minimize bandwidth consumption, and improve application performance through Cisco WAAS Data Redundancy Elimination (DRE), persistent Lempel-Ziv (LZ) compression, and Cisco WAAS Transport Flow Optimization (TFO).

• Improve application responsiveness-Enterprise applications (such as e-mail, enterprise resource planning [ERP], Internet and intranet, Citrix, and SMS) experience improved performance and response times as well as less bandwidth consumption in WAN environments.

• Achieve simple, network-friendly integration-Cisco WAAS integrates in a highly available, scalable, and transparent fashion, meeting enterprise availability and performance objectives while preserving investment in advanced network functions such as quality of service (QoS), Network-Based Application Recognition (NBAR), access control lists (ACLs), NetFlow, and firewall policies.

Cisco WAAS application acceleration and WAN optimization is tightly coupled with the packet network. Through the use of either the Web Cache Communication Protocol Version 2 (WCCPv2) or policy-based routing (PBR), Cisco WAAS integrates transparently, requiring no changes to clients, servers, or network features. Cisco WAAS provides high availability, scalability, and transparency, and fully maintains security, accounting, and application-specific policies. This solution provides robust application acceleration and WAN optimization capabilities to facilitate infrastructure consolidation and improved application delivery.

MICROSOFT SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT SERVER

Microsoft SMS 2003 is a software product that offers IT organizations a simplified management framework for a distributed network of servers and computers. SMS functions include:

• Application deployment-SMS offers detailed application deployment planning, rich distribution targeting, delta distribution, and support for adding or removing programs to servers and workstations. It delivers applications reliably and easily to users in the right place at the right time.

• Asset management-Application usage monitoring, granular software inventory searching, detailed hardware inventory, and Web-enabled reporting reduce software and management costs, and help organizations stay compliant by understanding the installed application base and its usage.

• Security patch management-Vulnerability identification, vulnerability assessments, and patch deployment wizards improve security of the Microsoft Windows environment through increased vulnerability awareness and reliable targeted delivery of updates.

• Mobility-Bandwidth awareness, checkpoints and restarts, and location awareness facilitate support for the distributed workforce.

• Windows management services integration-Active Directory discovery, site boundaries, security, and remote assistance reduce operational costs by fully using the management capabilities built into the Windows platform.

Although SMS provides robust capabilities with regard to simplified management of a distributed network of servers and computers, it also requires that a complex, hierarchical server infrastructure be deployed at each remote location where clients and servers need to be supported, as shown in Figure 1. A typical SMS topology includes the following roles, some of which can be cohosted on the same server:

• Site server-The site server contains the SMS database (Structured Query Language [SQL]). A central-site server is required, which contains the configuration of all child locations. Site servers in child locations act as a low-maintenance proxy of the central-site server for their specific site.

• Server locator point-The server locator point locates client access points (CAPs) for older clients and management points for advanced clients.

• Reporting point-The reporting point provides report generation and storage.

• Distribution point-The distribution point provides packages for distribution either through Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) over HTTP or through a Universal Naming Convention (UNC) path.

• Management point-The management point provides the site-server interface to advanced clients, and manages policies relative to software metering and software inventory.

• Client access point (CAP)-One SMS client access point, which is responsible for responding to client requests for data, is required at each site where clients will download software.

Figure 1. Typical Microsoft SMS Hierarchy

Microsoft SMS clients can leverage BITS over HTTP or CIFS to download software packages from SMS distribution points or client access points, depending on the configuration of the client and the server. Figure 2 shows a typical workflow with a client using SMS to download and install a package.

Figure 2. Microsoft SMS Workflow to Distribute and Install a Package

MICROSOFT SMS CHALLENGES

Although SMS discovery, inventory, and management tasks do not produce much demand on the network and are executed at low frequency, software distribution is bandwidth-intensive and requires complex distribution practices to ensure correct operation in large-scale environments. Furthermore, a large number of servers have to be deployed and managed to ensure timely distribution of packages to clients and servers as well as policy enforcement and reporting. The result is that a complicated SMS server hierarchy (or alternatively huge network load) must be installed, as well the necessary storage capacity and data protection.

INCORPORATING CISCO WAAS IN A MICROSOFT SMS ENVIRONMENT

IT organizations now need to eliminate unnecessary servers to control costs, including SMS servers in branch offices or smaller secondary sites. With this requirement is the need to improve application delivery and minimize WAN bandwidth consumption-and these goals must be achieved without compromising the performance or correctness associated with existing SMS deployments and functions, including management and control capabilities. Although data center facilities may easily accommodate large numbers of SMS servers for scalability and performance reasons, deployment and maintenance of such servers at the network edge is very resource-consuming and difficult to control-and it creates inconsistencies and cost challenges.
Cisco WAAS allows IT organizations to consolidate costly server infrastructure, including software distribution infrastructure such as SMS servers, without compromising on performance or correctness of operation. It provides WAN optimization capabilities and application-specific acceleration through devices that are deployed on each side of the WAN. These devices, called the Cisco Wide Area Application Engine (WAE) are available as router-integrated network modules or as standalone appliances, and are deployed out of the data path in the data center and in the remote-office LAN.
With Cisco WAAS, IT organizations are better positioned to:

• Centralize costly distributed IT capital resources into the data center

• Improve throughput and delivery of applications and application data to the enterprise edge

• Increase efficiency for existing WAN connections

• Maintain remote-office user application performance expectations

Cisco WAAS enables such benefits through a series of optimizations that are not only application-friendly, but also packet network-friendly.

• Application-specific acceleration-Application-specific acceleration mitigates application latency and bandwidth consumption through protocol acceleration, read ahead, safe data caching, and other optimizations to improve application responsiveness and performance over the WAN. With Cisco WAAS, packages can be prepositioned to the network edge proactively or cached dynamically based on user requests. Application protocol latency and bandwidth consumption for SMS is mitigated and package download performance is improved.

• Advanced network compression-DRE can remove previously seen blocks of TCP data safely to minimize bandwidth consumption and dramatically improve throughput. Coupled with persistent LZ compression, Cisco WAAS can provide up to 100:1 compression. With Cisco WAAS, Microsoft SMS control and data traffic is heavily compressed, thereby minimizing the amount of data that must traverse the network.

• Throughput improvements-Cisco WAAS TFO overcomes bottlenecks created by using TCP as a transport in WAN environments, including throughput and loss recovery, to improve application performance, better leverage available WAN capacity, and mitigate the effect of loss and congestion. TFO improves the ability of a package transfer to take full advantage of WAN capacity, and minimizes the effect perceived in environments that tend to experience higher rates of packet loss.

With Cisco WAAS, almost any TCP-based application can benefit from the network and application-specific acceleration techniques, including Internet and intranet applications, databases, file services, file transfer, e-mail, data protection, client-server applications, and many others. Cisco WAAS can integrate transparently into a Microsoft SMS environment, as shown in Figure 3. With Cisco WAAS, I/T organizations can begin to consolidate costly software distribution servers such as Microsoft SMS while preserving features, functions, and performance.

Figure 3. Cisco WAAS Enables SMS Server Consolidation

Figure 4 demonstrates the results of the transfer of an 8-MB package to a remote client over a T1 connection (1.544 Mbps) with 80-ms round-trip delay and 0.5-percent packet loss. This figure shows that the initial transfer took approximately 90 seconds to complete over the native WAN with no optimization. By enabling Cisco WAAS with no compression history (cold state), a threefold improvement is seen in package download time, and the transfer takes less than 40 seconds. For redundant transfers in which Cisco WAAS has a compression history, or scenarios in which the package was prepositioned proactively to the Cisco WAE, the transfer takes less than 5 seconds, representing a fifteen-fold improvement in performance, rivaling that of local LAN performance.

Figure 4. Cisco WAAS Optimizes Microsoft SMS Package Installation and Minimizes Bandwidth Consumption

SUMMARY

Cisco WAAS provides robust application acceleration and WAN optimization technologies to improve application delivery while enabling infrastructure consolidation. With Cisco WAAS, IT organizations can effectively maintain service levels for existing locally deployed services while improving performance for centrally deployed application infrastructure. Customers who are planning to deploy a Microsoft SMS solution can reduce the cost of managing and deploying additional remote SMS distribution-point servers while minimizing the amount of bandwidth consumed by TCP traffic. Cisco WAAS facilitates high-performance delivery of SMS packages without requiring costly, difficult-to-manage remote server and storage infrastructure.