Cisco AnyConnect speed woes!

Zachary McGibbon zachary.mcgibbon+nanog at gmail.com
Tue Dec 9 19:42:01 UTC 2014


I'm looking for some input on a situation that has been plaguing our new
AnyConnect VPN setup.  Any input would be valuable, we are at a loss for
what the problem is.

We recently upgraded our VPN from our old Cisco 3000 VPN concentrators
running PPTP and we are now running a pair of Cisco 5545x ASAs in an HA
active/standby pair.

The big issue we are having is that many of our users are complaining of
low speed when connected to the VPN.  We have done tons of troubleshooting
with Cisco TAC and we still haven't found the root of our problem.

Some tests we have done:

   - We have tested changing MTU values
   - We have tried all combinations of encryption methods (SSL, TLS, IPSec,
   L2TP) with similar results
   - We have switched our active/standby boxes
   - We have tested on our spare 5545x box
   - We connected our spare box directly to our ISP with another IP address
   - We have whitelisted our VPN IP on our shaper (Cisco SCE8000) and our
   IPS (HP Tipping Point)
   - We have bypassed our Shaper and our IPS
   - We made sure that traffic from the routers talking to our ASAs is
   synchronous, OSPF was configured to load balance but this has been changed
   by changing the costs on the links to the ASAs
   - We have verified with our two ISPs that they are not doing any kind of
   filtering or shaping
   - We have noticed that in some instances that if a user is on a low
   speed connection that their VPN speed gets cut by about 1/3.  This doesn't
   seem normal that the VPN would use this much overhead
   - We do not have the issue when connecting to VPN directly on our own
   network, only connections from the Internet

If you have any ideas on what we could try net, please let me know!

- Zachary



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