Creating Applications from DSCP-marked traffic (like Riverbed accelerated traffic)

Some times you might find that the Exinda Appliance is located between two other types of network appliances that modify the traffic in a way that obscures the visibility of the Exinda appliance into the traffic. An example of this would be having the Exinda Appliance located between two Riverbed appliances doing acceleration. The Riverbed appliances will send all of the accelerated traffic over port 7800. The Exinda Appliance will then see all accelerated traffic as a single application even if there are multiple types of application traffic within that single Riverbed tunnel.

In this situation, DSCPDifferentiated Services Code Point marking of traffic can restore the visibility of different traffic types to the Exinda Appliance. Often these other network appliances will have the ability to apply DSCP marks to traffic based on the type of application traffic they are accelerating. For instance, these other appliances may be configured to apply DSCP mark 2 to all HTTP traffic and DSCP mark 3 to all SMB traffic. Then, on the Exinda appliance, you can create applications based on the DSCP marks.

Consider a Riverbed appliance and Exinda appliance in the same environment. By default the Exinda Appliance will report the accelerated traffic streams from the Riverbed appliance as a single traffic type. If you configure the Riverbed appliances to add DSCP markings based on specific traffic types, then on the Exinda appliance create applications based on the DSCP markings and the Riverbed tunnel port number. Each of these applications appears on the Exinda Appliance like other built in applications. That is, these new Riverbed accelerated applications appear on the applications monitor and on the real-time screen. They can also be added to application groups and can have policy applied to them.

To create applications based on DSCP marked applications in Riverbed-accelerated traffic:

1. On your Riverbed appliance, add DSCP markings for each traffic type that you are interested in.

See your Riverbed documentation to learn how to do this.

2. On your Exinda appliance, add an application for each DSCP-marked application type.

On the Add new Application form, type the DSCP mark number in the DSCP field and optionally fill in the Ports/Protocols field by selecting TCPTransmission Control Protocol Port Range and type 7800.

For instance, you could create a Riverbed SMB application and a Riverbed HTTP application.

Note that application names must be unique. SMB and HTTP are already named applications on the application, so you will have to name these new applications differently.

For more information refer to Predefined Applications and Supported L7 Signatures.

3. Use these applications are you would the predefined applications.