Riverbed® Steelhead® RiOS® Application Administrator's Guide 2010-10

Managing the HP AllianceONE Extended Services zl Module with the Riverbed® Steelhead® RiOS® Application

Modifying the Transparent Mode Configuration on the HP zl Switch

Modifying the Transparent Mode

Configuration on the HP zl Switch

To enable the Steelhead Application to accelerate traffic that will be transmit-

ted over a WAN link, the HP switches use a technology called Transparent

Mode to intercept packets that match certain criteria and redirect them to the

Steelhead Application that is running on the Extended Services zl Module. For

the selected traffic, Transparent Mode allows the Steelhead Application to be

in the path of packet flow. The Steelhead Application then accelerates the

delivery of the packets to their final destination.

Transparent Mode is available only when an Extended Services zl Module is

installed in an HP 5400zl or 8200zl switch. The switch must also be running

software version K.14.58 or above.

Because the HP switch is responsible for intercepting traffic, you must specify

exactly which traffic should be intercepted. In other words, you must define

the criteria that the switch will use to select the packets that should be

intercepted. When the switch determines that packets meet that criteria, it

forwards the traffic to the Extended Services zl Module with Steelhead

Application. To speechify this criteria on the switch, you must:

■ Define zones

■ Define zone policies

Configure Zones

The first criterion you define for Transparent Mode is to create one or more

zones and define the ports that will belong to each zone. By default, the HP

5400zl or 8200zl switch supports a maximum of ten zones.

Two zones are created automatically—BYPASS and SWITCH_SELF. You can-

not add ports to the SWITCH_SELF zone, which applies to the switch. As the

name suggests, the BYPASS zone should contain ports that will not carry

traffic destined for the WAN link. The switch will not intercept traffic on the

ports you add to the BYPASS zone.

You can create up to eight additional zones, keeping in mind these guidelines:

■ The switch ports you add to a zone can be in different VLANs.

■ Each switch port can belong to only one zone.

■ If a port is already associated with a zone, adding the port to another zone

removes that port from its existing zone and adds it to the new zone.