Deploying vWAAS

Overview

Earlier I blogged about deploying WAAS on a SRE. In our deployment, we used vWAAS to manage the WAAS appliances. vWAAS, as the v would imply, is a virtual machine. In our case, we deployed vWAAS as the Central Manager, dubbing it vCM. Tired of the acronyms yet? In this post, I’ll detail how to deploy vWAAS.

Deploying the OVA

I bet you’re wondering how to get a copy of vWAAS? So did I. At present, Cisco doesn’t have a license for you to activate vWAAS or even license how many WAAS appliances it can manage. You have to have the CD that came with your vWAAS order. Your Product Authorization Key (PAK) for vWAAS isn’t one you can activate to download a license or software — it’s just for record keeping.

Assuming you have the CD, login to vCenter and pop the CD in. In vCenter, go to File > Deploy OVF Template. Browse to the CD and you’ll see the *****.ova file. Select it, then name the VM. Casually navigate through the wizard until you get to the storage window. vWAAS is hungry and wants 254 GB of thick-provisioned storage. In our deployment, we had to carve up another LUN for him.

Click Finish to complete the installation and watch the progress bar, well, progress.

Close out the “Deployment Completed Successfully” window and power on the VM. Open a console session to the vWAAS:

Next, we’ll do some configuring…

Configuring vWAAS

Login to vWAAS using the default credentials of “admin” and “default”. Configure the IP address:

VWAAS(config)# interface virtual 1/0
VWAAS(config-if)# ip address 192.168.0.239 255.255.255.0
VWAAS(config-if)# exit

Configure the default gateway:

VWAAS(config)# ip default-gateway 192.168.0.1
VWAAS(config)# ip primary-interface virtual 1/0

Ping the IP addresses of the default gateway to verify they can be reached. Add the Enterprise license using the license command:

VWAAS# license add Enterprise

Next, configure your WAAS appliances with the IP address of the Central Manager (central‐manager address 192.168.0.239, cms enable). You should see the devices listed in the next section.

Navigating the Interface

To access vWAAS, open your browser and enter the following: https://central-manager:8443/. Don’t forget the HTTPS or the port 8443. Login to vWAAS using the default credentials of “admin” and “default”.

Once you’ve logged in, you’ll be in My WAN > Dashboard. Navigate to Manage Devices and you should see all of your WAAS Appliances listed:

Finally, you can view graphs to your heart’s content under the Monitor section:

Conclusion

Deploying vWAAS was really simple due to the OVA file to deploy. There really isn’t too much to conclude other than that.

– Andrew