Sizing an appliance

amansour — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 19:31:24 GMT

I commented on threads outside the knowledgebase on sizing an appliance. I thought I would start the discussion here as well. Usually we run the tap mode install to get the stats and found all the counters relevant to sizing the sessions etc by SPAN or Mirror of the main egress. Datacenter is harder because you usually can't do that.

Re: Sizing an appliance

mikand — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 08:23:38 GMT

Using tap-mode is the most foolproof way of find out real traffic (unless the customer has all its traffic in pcap files which then can be replayed using tcpreplay or such) given that the router/switch which is mirroring the traffic actually can do this without dropping packets. This way you will at least get the statistics (number of concurrent flows, bandwidth used etc).

Another method is to use VWIRE - however if you selected the wrong appliance then traffic will get affected.

So I guess its also a matter of how much you are willing to have a risk of disrupting current traffic.

If you are ok by this (like do this during a service window or such) then VWIRE would bring you a more real world experience if the selected appliance can deal with the current traffic load or not.

Because even if the numbers in the PA datasheets seems to be less imaginary (compared with competitors) they are still "measured under ideal situations". Which gives that an appliance which is rated for 20Gbit/s doesnt necessary have this throughput if the payloadsize is like 4kbyte instead of 1Mbyte.

topic Sizing an appliance in General Topics

Sizing an appliance

Re: Sizing an appliance