About peering settings

You display, add, and modify autodiscovery peering settings under Optimization > Network Services: Peering Rules. You can also enable extended peer table support.

Under Settings, these configuration options are available:

Enables enhanced autodiscovery for IPv4 and mixed (dual-stack) IPv4 and IPv6 networks.

With enhanced autodiscovery, the SteelHead automatically finds the furthest SteelHead along the connection path of the TCP connection, and optimization occurs there: for example, in a deployment with four SteelHeads (A, B, C, D), where D represents the appliance that is furthest from A, the SteelHead automatically finds D. This feature simplifies configuration and makes your deployment more scalable.

By default, enhanced autodiscovery peering is enabled. Without enhanced autodiscovery, the SteelHead uses regular autodiscovery. With regular auto-discovery, the SteelHead finds the first remote SteelHead along the connection path of the TCP connection, and optimization occurs there: for example, if you had a deployment with four SteelHeads (A, B, C, D), where D represents the appliance that is furthest from A, the SteelHead automatically finds B, then C, and finally D, and optimization takes place in each.

This option uses an IPv4 channel to the peer SteelHead over a TCP connection, and your network connection must support IPv4 for the inner channels between the SteelHead and the SteelCentral Controller for SteelHead Mobile. If you have an all-IPv6 (single-stack IPv6) network, select the Enable Enhanced IPv6 Auto-Discovery option.

For detailed information about deployments that require enhanced autodiscovery peering, see the SteelHead Deployment Guide.

Enables enhanced autodiscovery for single-stack IPv6 networks.

Enable Extended Peer Table enables support for up to 20,000 peers on high-end server-side SteelHeads (and CX models 5055 and 7055) to accommodate large SteelHead client deployments. The RiOS data store maintains the peers in groups of 1,024 in the global peer table.

We recommend enabling the extended peer table if you have more than 4,000 peers.

By default, this option is disabled and it’s unavailable on SteelHead models that don’t support it.

Before enabling this feature, you must have a thorough understanding of performance and scaling issues. When deciding whether to use extended peer table support, you should compare it with a serial cluster deployment. For details on serial clusters, see the SteelHead Deployment Guide.