Planning decisions to be made

Deployment decisions to be made

This chapter will help you make the following deployment decisions:

Whether a hierarchy would be beneficial to your NetCache deployment
Type of hierarchy that best fits the needs of your NetCache deployment

Decisions you should make before configuring your hierarchy

Before you begin to set up a hierarchy, it is a good idea to consider membership roles and gather information specific to each member (proxy-cache server or firewall) of your hierarchy. Consider the following:

If a firewall exists in the NetCache environment, whether special NetCache configuration is required.
If you want an authentication scheme, and where in the hierarchy to implement the scheme.
Whether you need to customize how requests are distributed among hierarchy members.
How you want each NetCache appliance to interact with other proxy-cache servers and firewalls in your organization.
Distribution modes and protocols that the hierarchy feature supports.
Whether you need to identify each hierarchy member to your NetCache appliance as a logical parent, a logical neighbor, or a firewall.
Whether you need to create custom hierarchy rules or whether hierarchy rules supplied by NetCache are sufficient for your organization. For example, consider whether you want to designate a specific NetCache appliance in your hierarchy to service a specific protocol or request type.

Information to gather before you continue

Before continuing with NetCache configuration, ensure that you have the following information:

Host name of all caches to be configured in the hierarchy
HTTP ports used by each cache in the hierarchy