Cisco IOS Load Balancing for Blue Coat SGOS

Some time ago I used IOS SLB fea­ture on a C6500 to load bal­ance a pair of Blue Coat ProxySG. Here the con­fug­ur­a­tion and some notes.

Fast Introduction to SOCKS Proxy

Introduction
In the Blue Coat for­ums I often see people ask ques­tions about SOCKS that show they haven’t taken the time to learn what it is. This is a fast intro­duc­tion to what SOCKS is.

Blue Coat ProxySG VIP and Cisco Switches Need Multicast Enabled

You have a pair of shiny new ProxySG boxen that you want to setup in act­ive /​ standby for high avail­ab­il­ity. You con­fig­ure it up and everything seems to work, and then it doesn’t, or other equip­ment on the same net­work exper­i­ences ran­dom problems.

What you are hav­ing is a Multicast prob­lem with your Ethernet switches, most likely your Cisco switches, that has the prob­lem. How to under­stand and solve the prob­lem after the jump.

Checking Connectivity on Your Blue Coat ProxySG

A very simple tool in your Proxy SG to check that you can access resources. It only works for HTTP but it provides a good check. I use this a lot in net­works where ICMP has been dis­abled for security.

Performance of Blue Coat BCAAA Agent for Authentication

A com­mon ques­tion in the Blue Coat for­ums is about the server spe­cific­a­tion for the BCAAA and how many users can be sup­por­ted. While I am not sure sure about the per­form­ance that Blue Coat recom­mends I can tell you my experiences.