Gathering preconfiguration information

You must plan the configuration

Accelerator configuration will require less time if you make some decisions and gather some information before you start configuring the appliance. To plan for acceleration configuration, you must do the following:

Determine how clients will access the appliance. You can set up transparent or nontransparent client access to the appliance.
Determine the type or types of protocols you will configure.

Information you need to gather

Before you begin configuring the appliance, gather the information described in the following table, based on the deployment decisions you have made.

Before deploying the appliance...	Do the following...
As an accelerator for one or more Web or RTSP streaming servers	Gather the following information about the accelerator: Host name of the accelerator (and virtual host names, if any) IP addresses of network interfaces Additional IP addresses to be used as IP aliases for the appliance to accelerate the servers Port or ports on which the appliance should accept requests from clients (for example, for HTTP requests, 80 and 3128) Note The sum of appliance IP addresses and IP aliases should be equal to the number of servers to be accelerated. Gather the following information about each server to be accelerated: IP address Ports (usually port 80 for Web servers) Domain names
As an accelerator for an MMS streaming server	Gather the following information: IP address of the server to be accelerated IP addresses of appliance network interfaces Additional IP addresses to be used as IP aliases for the appliance to accelerate the servers Note The sum of appliance IP addresses and IP aliases should be equal to the number of servers to be accelerated.
Outside a firewall with Web servers inside the firewall	Configure the firewall to allow requests from the appliance to be sent through the firewall.
And securing it from unauthorized client access	If you want to secure the appliance so that it cannot be used to resolve requests from unauthorized clients or caches outside your organization, gather the following information: IP addresses of any appliances you want to have permission to use this appliance to resolve requests IP addresses of any clients you want to have permission to use this appliance to resolve requests

Client access to an accelerator

You can provide client access to an accelerator using the following two methods:

Configuring DNS to support an accelerator
Using transparent proxying

Client access through DNS

When you configure DNS to support client access to an accelerator, you configure the accelerator's IP addresses and IP aliases in DNS to allow the accelerator to receive requests for the servers it is accelerating. You can set up DNS in the following ways:

The accelerator handles all requests for the servers it is accelerating.
Requests are split between the accelerator and the servers it is accelerating.

Client access through transparent proxying

To set up client access through transparent proxying, you use an L4 or L7 switch or WCCP router to provide access to an accelerator.

To support accelerators, the switch or router is deployed close to the accelerators. For details, see the transparency chapter in the Administration Guide.