Lab: WAN Acceleration with WANOS and WANEM: Part 1

 WAN links can be expensive and unless you have a lot of money to shell out it is likely that you don't have dedicated gigabit bandwidth available to you - so it makes sense to optimize the performance in any way we can.

While there are dozens and dozens of different solutions out there all offering similar results I chose WANOS (http://wanos.co) since it seems to be fairly well established product and provides a reasonable pricing model - either free (with limited support) or paid (with support and updates.)

WANOS can also be downloaded as a virtual appliance enabling me to lab it up nice and easily!

I have outlined a few of the main / interesting features of WANOS below:

- Packet Loss Recovery: Ensures that data is delivered reliability over the LAN.

- Universal Deduplication: Provides cross-flow deduplication on byte patterns (hence is protocol independent)

- Compression: Compresses data on the fly which is going over the WAN link

- Quality of Service: Provides features such as traffic shaping, tagging and classification.

The lab will consist of two sites (A and B) which go over a capped WAN link of 10mbps.

I want to perform some performance tests over the two sites with and without WANOS like follows:

Obviously being in a lab environment; packet loss, jitter and latency are unlikely to be anything like the real world – although fortunately we can emulate these within WANEM! Other factors to take into consideration are the data de-duplication process and the processor speed (as this may affect performance greatly.)

I will setup the WANEM virtual appliance (emulating the WAN link) as follows:

Hardware	Value
RAM	2GB
Disk	8GB
Virtual NIC	Bridged x1

In part two we will start to build are virtual lab.