About appliance considerations
SteelHead-v is software that delivers acceleration similar to that offered by the SteelHead hardware, while also providing the flexibility of virtualization. Built on the same underlying operating system as the physical SteelHead, SteelHead-v supports:
• out-of-path deployments.
• virtual in-path deployments.
• physical in-path deployments with bypass cards.
• peering through Discovery Agent.
• fail-to-wire and fail-to-block with Riverbed NICs.
• asymmetric route detection.
• connection-forwarding.
• high availability in active-active configurations, with data store synchronization across serial clusters.
• management and reporting through SteelCentral Controller for SteelHead (SCC).
SteelHead-v does not support:
• Proxy file service (PFS).
• hardware reports, such as those for disk status.
• hardware-based alerts and notifications, such as a RAID alarm
The product runs on VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper‑V, and Linux KVM hypervisors installed on industry-standard hardware servers. SteelHead-v on VMware vSphere is certified for the Cisco Service-Ready Engine (SRE) module with Cisco Services-Ready Engine Virtualization (Cisco SRE-V).
SteelHead-v supports up to 24 virtual CPUs and 10 interfaces.