Overview of the SCC-VE

This chapter provides an overview of the SCC-VE: a virtualized appliance of the SteelCentral Controller for SteelHead specifically designed for customers (such as Managed Service Providers) and users who need to centrally manage multiple, separate deployments of the Riverbed system on behalf of their customers. This chapter includes these sections:

These new features are available in version 9.9:

• Updated VMware Tools to version 10.1.0. Learn about known issues and workarounds for this version of VMware tools here:

• SCC-VE is supported on Microsoft Azure Hyper-V and available in the Microsoft Azure marketplace.

This section describes the prerequisites necessary to install the product.

All licensing must be properly in place. Appliances can still be managed if appliance licenses are valid and available.

You need to have valid licenses installed on all appliances that you want to manage with the SCC-VE.

A missing base license on an appliance can cause the health of the SCC-VE to become critical and temporarily invalidates other SCC-VE licenses which in turn prevents management of appliances.

You can access each SCC-VE instance through HTTP, HTTPS, or SSH. You can configure the default access protocol in the Management Console. For details, see the SteelCentral Controller for SteelHead User Guide.

For SteelHead management, each SCC-VE instance requires port 80 and port 443 inbound from the SteelHeads and port 22 outbound from each SCC-VE instance to SteelHeads.

The installation process requires accessing the VMware Infrastructure Client (VIC) on a Windows workstation. For requirements, see the VMware documentation.

The SCC-VE consists of three files:

• Hard disk 1 contains the operating system. The default value is 39 GB.

• Hard disk 2 is for statistics storage and must be provisioned according to the following table. The default value is 5 GB.

• Hard disk 3 is for RSP image and package management and must be provisioned based on total size of the image and package files. The default value is 2 GB.

The total datastore space required for the SCC-VE is the sum of the three VMDK files with a minimum value of 32 GB to a maximum of over 400 GB.

Number of appliances managed	Hard disk 2	RAM	CPU (effective)
Up to 50	50 GB	4 GB	2 core, 2 GHz
Up to 100	100 GB	6 GB	2 cores, 2 GHz
Up to 250*	250 GB	6 GB	2 cores, 2 GHz
Up to 500*	400 GB	16 GB	4 cores, 2.4 GHz
Up to 1500*	400 GB	32 GB	4 cores, 4 GHz

* Use the 64-bit SCC-VE when managing more than 100 appliances.

Component	Description
VMware	VMware ESXi 6.0, 6.5
SCC Management Console	The SCC has been tested with Mozilla Firefox Extended Support Release version 38 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 11. JavaScript and cookies must be enabled in your web browser.

The SCC-VE facilitates these administrative tasks as a multitenant solution for managing deployments of the Riverbed system across parallel network environments.

• Multiple Instances - The SCC-VE is a virtual appliance that’s installed in your VMware ESXi cluster. You can run multiple SCC-VE instances, provided that the ESXi platform has sufficient hardware resources and the appropriate licenses are available.

• Configuration - The SCC-VE enables you to automatically configure new SteelHead groups or to send configuration settings to appliances in remote offices. The SCC-VE uses configuration objects (that is, policies and groups) to facilitate centralized configuration and reporting.

• Monitoring - The SCC-VE provides both high-level status of and detailed statistics about the performance of SteelHeads and enables you to configure event notification for managed SteelHeads.

• Management - The SCC-VE enables you to start, stop, restart, and reboot remote SteelHeads. You can also schedule jobs to send software upgrades and configuration changes to remote appliances or to collect logs from remote SteelHeads.

• Partial Federation - You can put any appliance into branch-managed mode to prevent configuration changes or maintenance operations from the SCC-VE. The SCC-VE continues to monitor and gather statistics from appliances that are branch managed.

• Operations History - The Operations History page in the Management Console lists all of the actions related to configuring SteelHeads that have been performed and indicates whether they were successful or not.

VMware ESXi is a virtualization platform that enable you to install and run the SteelCentral Controller for SteelHead as a virtual appliance. For details about VMware ESXi, see http://www.vmware.com.

For details about implementation requirements for the SCC-VE, see Prerequisites.