Riverbed - CIFs WAN Optimization and Acceleration that just works

Riverbed is a leader in the WAN Optimization Controller space. We have implemented these devices at a client that had users in remote offices using a network file server (via VPN) and were experiencing less than stella performance. Anyone that has done CIFs file sharing over WAN, knows that it is painfully slow - it is by design intended for local use, not over low bandwidth, high latency WAN connections.

Summary of the setup:

• Topology, hub/spoke arrangement.
• Branch office users, save files to the main office file server.
• Files are typical office docs, pdfs, and images - upto 100megs+ in size.
• Branch location slowest links are ADSL.
• VPN connection already exists.
• XP Clients to Windows 2003 file server.
• Branch offices are NOT on the Active Directory - just have a \\x.x.x.x\share shortcut on the desktop.
• The head office AD has an account that matches their local login usernames and passwords.

 Riverbed Steelhead units dropped into the Head Office, and at the branch offices. These units sit inline after your firewall LAN port, and the network switch. If there is a crash on the Riverbed Steelhead unit, the electronics will do an auto failover, and will route the traffic straight through the device (there is 2 cables connecting into the switch on the Riverbed unit).

Tip: Manually set the port speed on your switches to match the port speed on the Riverbed interfaces.

We also optioned the RSP (Riverbed Services Platform) kit on the head office Riverbed Steelhead unit. This enables a low capacity, virtualized version of their Steelhead Mobile unit. You can additionally deploy VMs such as domain controllers with the RSP kit, although this wasn't tested.

Using a 10 pack of Mobile clients, we were able to connect users at the remote offices that did have a VPN connection, but didn't have enough users to warrant a Riverbed Steelhead device.

If we wanted mobile users to utilize the Riverbed Mobile client, we would need these users to first connect via VPN.

Before and after file transfer/open/save tests over the VPN showed a 25x + improvement. Even the first pass, with the Riverbed installed, CIFs traffic is optimized, but the massive gains happen after the Riverbed's have "seen" the data before.

These devices do not come cheap, but it is probably one of the coolest, drop in, turn it on, technology solutions I have seen implemented for a long time.

NexentaStor 2.2 with LSI MegaRAID SAS 8888ELP

Fresh install of Nexenta 2.2 running on the following hardware:

• Supermicro X8STE Motherboard
• Intel XEON E5520
• LSI MegaRAID SAS 8888ELP
• Intel Quad Gigabit nic PRO/1000 PT
• 12gigs ram (Nexenta loves RAM!)

We reused a LSI MegaRAID, and had to set each drive connected, to be a single "virtual" RAID0 drive - in the MegaRAID onboard bios configuration (Ctl - H on startup from memory). Then this presents a bunch of individual drives to Nexenta. NexetaStor 2.2 includes all the mega_sas drivers, so once we had the drives recognized by the controller, they then appeared immediately to NexentaStor.

Only after we had flashed both the motherboard and the LSI card (by putting it into a Windows computers to flash) to the latest firmware revisions, were we able to get Nexenta installed at all. Please always flash flash flash to the latest firmware and save yourself a bunch of time!

In the pic below, you can see a pair of 2.5" SSDs which we are using for the Nexenta OS in a RAIDZ mirror config. The mounting kits for these drives on the free PCI slots are from A-Tech Fabrication. I did toy around with running Nexenta off a USB flash stick, and use the SSDs for cache and logs, but will wait until that configuration has been tested by Nexenta.

Finally, would like to wish all the website visitors, and my clients a Happy and Prosperous New Year for 2010! Also proud to have made end of year contribution to Chatswood Computer Consultants charity of choice: MÉDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRES (MSF)

Linksys WAG325N + CISCO VPN issues

I had a long time problem with my client's CISCO VPN connections to the Australian Tax Office - via HandiTax and Simplefund.

Every time they were lodging to the ATO, they had to retry the lodgement several times before it successfully connected and transmitted.

The problem was consistent across two different software applications but there was a common component with the CISCO VPN client. After the light bulb light up above my head, I googled "Linksys WAG325N CISCO VPN problem" and came across the following forum post on the Linksys site:

http://forums.linksysbycisco.com/linksys/board/message?message.uid=113940

I double checked that the IPSec Passthrough was enabled, but the other part that I needed to add to the router configuration was to put entries under Applications & Gaming -> Port Range Triggering. I did another google search for which ports are used by the CISCO VPN, and put in 500, 4500 and 10000.

Here is a screenshot (click it for a larger view) of the relevant page on the router setup.

After I made these changes, lodging returns to the ATO in both HandiTax and Simplefund worked flawlessly each time on first attempt!

VMWare ESXi 4.0 + HP ProLiant DL160 G5

Confirmed - VMWare ESXi 4.0 works on a HP ProLiant DL160 G5

Sometimes it is frustrating to find out if your non HCL hardware will work with ESXi before shelling out $ on hardware, but in my case, I don't have to commit this hardware just for VM service, so it was more of a test if anything, and if it works, it may even go into light production duty (probably would advise to go for something on the official HCL for mission critical duty).

For more whitebox and official hardware compatibility info with ESXi, check out:

• http://www.vm-help.com/
• http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php

The following configuration options worked for me:

• DL160 firmware up to current version as of Oct 2009
• SATA RAID disabled
• Installed onto internal SATA hard drive
• I had to re-order the boot priority of the SATA hard drives (I have 2 installed) for ESXi 4.0 to boot after the installation (via CD - onto one of the hard drives)
• Both NICs are seen by ESXi 4.0 as well

I also confirmed that this 1U server also worked fine with Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. But what I didn't count on, is how locked down and inconvenient it is for lab testing compared to VMWare's bare metal product. Hyper-V does look great at first glance with the free vmotion stuff, but it just takes too long to setup in a non domain lab setup (and can only be managed from a Win2k8, Vista or Windows 7 console!). For now, going to stick with VMWare products. :)

NexentaStor - increasing swap space

Here's another tip I forgot to post yesterday. How to increase the swap space on your NexentaStor server.

When I was trouble shooting our NexentaStore server when it has low available drive space, in the NexentaStor documentation I found that the default swap size is the memory size. For some reason we had a 1 gig swap file, and 4 gig of ram. Perhaps we didn't have all the ram populated on original install, so just to make sure everything was setup correct to help my trouble shooting, I went looking for a way to increase the swap space.

Since there wasn't any option I could find in the web gui, I was certain it was going to be a CLI thang. After some googling, I came across this:

http://www.crypticide.com/dropsafe/article/2649

I ssh-ed into the NexentaStor server as the admin user, and ran:

zfs set volsize=4G syspool/swap

This changed the swap space to the same size as the physical ram in the server.