Cisco Intelligent Traffic Director (Routed Firewall Mode Only)

Cisco Intelligent Traffic Director (ITD) is a high-speed hardware load-balancing solution that

  • supports Nexus 5000, 6000, 7000, and 9000 switch series

  • fully covers the functional capabilities of traditional PBR with a simplified configuration workflow, and

  • offers multiple additional features for more granular load distribution.

ITD capabilities and configuration

When using Individual interfaces, each Firewall Threat Defense interface maintains its own IP address and MAC address.

ITD provides these load-balancing capabilities:

  • IP stickiness

  • Consistent hashing for bi-directional flow symmetry

  • Virtual IP addressing

  • Health monitoring

  • Sophisticated failure handling policies with N+M redundancy

  • Weighted load-balancing

  • Application IP SLA probes including DNS

Due to the dynamic nature of load-balancing, ITD achieves a more even traffic distribution across all cluster nodes as compared to PBR. To achieve bi-directional flow symmetry, configure ITD such that forward and return packets of a connection are directed to the same Firewall Threat Defense.

For more details, refer to Cisco Intelligent Traffic Director Deployment Guide with Cisco ASA.