You can deploy virtual appliances in the same scenarios as physical ones, with the exception that fail-to-wire requires that the physical host has Riverbed NICs. For deployments where a Riverbed bypass NIC is not an option, we recommend that you do not deploy your appliance in-path. If you are not using a bypass card, you can still have a failover mechanism by employing either a virtual in-path or an out-of-path deployment. These deployments allow a router using Web Cache Communication Protocol (WCCP) or policy-based routing (PBR) to handle failover.

NIC promiscuous mode is required for in-path deployments.