Preface

Introduction

Welcome! This book is about troubleshooting Riverbed Steelhead appliances and networks optimized by the Steelhead appliances. It contains the experiences with cases handled by the Riverbed TAC on how to detect the source of problems in networks with Steelhead appliances and how to troubleshoot problems with Steelhead appliances.

For many years, networking has been fun but it has become relative boring: Moving packets around, processing routing updates for reconnected networks and linking up different transport layers. Everybody knows and understands IP routing and troubleshooting it is a pretty straight forward process. WAN optimization is a new field, a Steelhead appliance is not just a router or switch where packets go through, it is a hop in the network where packets get mangled, contents get changed and some magic happens: Shazam! Knowing how this magic works will help you understand what is happening and resolve issues with the Steelhead appliances faster and more efficient.

Edwin.

Intended Audience

This is not a book on how to manage and deploy Steelhead appliances, the Riverbed Deployment Guide and the Steelhead Management Console User's Guide (both available from the Riverbed Support website) are the right books for that. This is a book about what can go wrong with Steelhead appliances in a network. This book is for everybody who has two or more Steelhead appliances in their network and wants to understand how the Steelhead appliances interact with other devices in the network, what can go wrong and how to use the features on the Steelhead appliance to troubleshoot it.

The easiest way to troubleshoot Steelhead appliances is to know what is expected to happen when you poke and prod it. Depending on the behaviour seen, the next steps can be easily determined. Very simple steps, very logical steps, sounds nearly like a normal networking troubleshoot approach. And that is often all what is required.

This book describes experiences, possible issues and troubleshooting with the xx20, xx50, CX and EX series Steelhead appliances and software versions up to, and including, RiOS 8.5.

Organization of this book

This book is split in several chapters; The first chapters with some background on WAN optimization, the next set of chapters are about tools available on Steelhead appliances, followed by the troubleshooting parts.