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 RiOS 9.10:

–Cold pass improvements on branch SteelHeads and SaaS Accelerator clusters - Because some SteelHead performance improvements are derived from cached data, the first pass accessing an object has the least improvements due to caching. This feature improves the performance of first access to SaaS Accelerator optimized data.

–First packet optimization - First packet optimization improves interoperability and performance with SaaS Accelerator.

–Integrated Active Directory joins - You can now connect to a Windows Server 2019 Active Directory server and enable SMB optimization for all users in that AD domain.

–Discovery Agent - You can now load the Riverbed Discovery Agent on Windows 2019 servers in the cloud. Discovery Agent enables traffic from the server to be properly routed through a nearby Cloud SteelHead, enabling optimization of traffic to and from it.

•RiOS now supports inbound QoS reporting on SteelCentral NetProfiler 10.18.

•SteelCentral NetProfiler 10.18 supports the polling and translation of custom applications from 9.10 SteelHead appliances. No additional configuration is needed to take advantage of the custom application support, the NetProfiler automatically acquires the custom application definitions from the SteelHead appliances.

•RiOS includes support for Mac OS X 10.13/10.14-based for SMB2 and 3. Access to MacOS 10.13 and 10.14 based SMB2 and SMB3 shares can be optimized with SteelHead appliances.

•RiOS now limits the number of concurrent sessions to one for each user account and/or administrator account type. Common Criteria requires that a user account cannot be shared or used by multiple sessions at the same time.

•System restart reporting has been improved with the CLI command show reboot reason which displays why the system restarted. For more information, see the Riverbed Command-Line Interface Reference Manual.

•RiOS now displays power level readings to help you debug networking issues on optical interface cards with fiber interfaces (NIC-1-010G-2SR-BP or NIC-1-010G-2LR-BP). The show interface <interface> brief command must be executed by an administrator user. For details, see the Riverbed Command-Line Interface Reference Manual.

•RiOS includes Kerberos support of N-1 version of the Key for AP_REQUEST.

•Due to the security issues associated with SMB1/CIFS, the SCC now provides the ability to disable SMB1/CIFS for external backups.

•SCC now performs an entitlement check based on the support ID of SteelHead appliances to ensure that software upgrades for virtual SteelHead appliances is seamless.

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” on page 10.