Cisco Cisco ACE Application Control Engine Module White Paper
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Page 3 of 40
Benefits of an ACE Migration
The Cisco ACE30 module for the Cisco Catalyst
®
6500 Series Switches and Cisco 7600 Series Routers is an
industry-leading application switch, increasing the availability, accelerating the performance, and enhancing the
security of data center applications. The Cisco ACE30 module allows enterprises and service providers to benefit
from higher performance and a richer feature set compared to the Cisco ACE10 and Cisco ACE20 modules. The
benefits of the Cisco ACE30 module include:
●
Double server-load-balancing (SLB) connections-per-second (CPS) performance
●
Double Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) transactions-per-second (TPS) performance and throughput
●
Addition of up to 6 Gbps of HTTP compression
●
New licensing structure that unlocks all ACE30 module capacity by bandwidth
●
IPv6 dual-stack and translation
●
Nexus 7000 Integration with Dynamic Workload scaling
ACE Migration Overview
The Cisco ACE migration process is an extension of the well known software upgrade process. The process has
three parts: confirming prerequisites, staging the Cisco ACE30 modules, and migrating the Cisco ACE10 or ACE20
configuration to Cisco ACE30 modules. While Cisco ACE migration requires onsite support, because of the need to
physically replace the ACE10 or ACE20 modules with the Cisco ACE30 modules, it follows the standard process
used in hitless software upgrades. The following highlights of the Cisco ACE migration process will be covered in
detail:
●
Backing up existing Cisco ACE10/20 modules
●
Staging Cisco ACE30 modules
●
Migrating the backup Cisco ACE10 or ACE20 modules to Cisco ACE30 modules
●
Making the backup Cisco ACE30 module active
●
Migrating the primary Cisco ACE10 or ACE20 module to Cisco ACE30 module
●
Making the primary Cisco ACE30 Module active
The Cisco ACE migration process provides a seamless migration from the Cisco ACE10 and ACE20 to the new
Cisco ACE30 modules helping to ensure a hitless Layer 4 migration to Cisco ACE30. While proxied connections
will be affected during the two forced failovers during the migration, you can maintain client persistence if you
configure it. This helps to ensure client session resumption of proixed connections after each failover event.
Confirming Prerequisites
The first step in the Cisco ACE migration process is to define the migration prerequisites. This lays the ground-
work for a successful and uneventful migration experience. The prerequisites for a Cisco ACE migration consist of:
verifying Cisco IOS
®
Software versions, making backups of Cisco ACE, verifying access to backup servers,
locating the proper staging area, and understanding the impact to client/server traffic during the migration process.
It is very important to use the Cisco ACE Migration Worksheet, found at the end of this document, to help ensure
a successful Cisco ACE migration.