ACE Boot Camp – Days 3 and 4

Days 3 and 4 did not disappoint! I don’t know if I stated this in the earlier posts, but the days basically consisted of lecture in the morning and labs after lunch. I REALLY, REALLY enjoyed the lecture portion. Again, I have to state that the instructor was fairly knowledgeable in regards to ACE, so he was able to actually teach instead of regurgitate a slide deck like other classes I have been in. That makes all the difference in the world. As for the labs, I guess they do some good if you have not had much experience with the ACE CLI. We did not do any labs using the built in GUI or ANM. The problem I have with labs is that they are a very canned and controlled environment. You end up just going through the motions without actually soaking up what it is that you are doing. Ideally, the labs would need to be tailored to your environment to have the greatest effect. This of course, is not realistic. Having said that, I am sure there are some people who get something out of it. My opinion was shared by others in the class in regards to the effectiveness of the labs, so I am not the only one who feels this way. However, the effectiveness of the lecture portion completely overshadowed any shortcomings of the lab portion.

In the interest of brevity, I am going to touch on the things I thought were the most interesting, but I don’t want this post to be so long it requires a coffee break to finish.

Route Health Injection – On a simplistic level, RHI allows the ACE to inject a host route into the network. You would use this to advertise the VIP(virtual IP) that clients use to connect to a server farm. If the server farm is not available due any number of issues, the host route can be automatically removed from the route table and not advertised. The alternative is to simply advertise the VIP’s as part of a regular subnet advertisement like you do with any other VLAN or subnet. Again, I am simplifying this and need to point out that this is NOT something that is specific to Cisco ACE. Other vendors implement similar technologies.

KeepAlive-Appliance Protocol(KAL-AP) – There’s a few variations of the Cisco ACE, and one of those is the Global Site Selector(GSS). Its purpose is simply to provide higher level load balancing between data centers. Basically, it is a load balancer of load balancers. By using KAL-AP, the GSS can query VIP’s at multiple data centers and determine which one is the best fit to send traffic to.

There are a couple of things that the ACE 4710 appliance does that the ACE module cannot. I asked the question as to why this is the case and was told that the ACE appliance has different architecture than the module. It has certain functionality that might come to the module at some point, but for now is restricted to the appliance. These extra functions really revolve around the ACE appliance being able to cache certain HTTP objects and speeding up the process of delivering a web page to an end user. A fair amount of detail on this can be found here.

It sure seems as if I cut back on the information from days 3 and 4 when compared to 1 and 2. I did. Although there were plenty of interesting things covered in the past 2 days of class, a lot of those things would take a while to explain and draw out via diagrams. That’s also assuming that I actually understand these things well enough to explain them in depth.

That brings to me to a more philosophical point in regards to the type of niche product that Cisco ACE is. While it would be great if you knew the CLI on ACE backwards and forwards, it really isn’t necessary. What is necessary is an understanding of what a platform like ACE is capable of. I sat in a meeting today in which some developers wanted ACE to perform health checks on a server outside of a load balance pool and use the results of that query to determine whether or not servers should be removed from a load balance pool. Basically, they wanted to do something that ACE is not really designed to do. Spending 4 days in a classroom learning all about ACE gave me the information needed to have a productive meeting with these developers today. I was able to answer their questions and give better guidance than I would have a couple of weeks ago. I don’t know all the commands for ACE. I will still have to use the configuration guides to look things up now and again. The important thing is that I understand the capabilities and limitations of the ACE load balancer a lot better today than I did prior to taking the ACE class. My main goal is to know what it can and cannot do in order to design anything requiring load balancing properly. To me that is more important than memorizing commands.