Managing appliances

You manage Riverbed appliances under Manage > Topology: Appliances. The SCC uses appliance groups and appliance policies to facilitate centralized configuration, management, and reporting of remote Riverbed appliances.

Appliance groups enable you to more effectively manage, monitor, and configure Riverbed appliances. For example, at the group level you can apply policies, push configurations, set passwords, and so forth. Appliance groups can be based on location, similarity of features, or whatever criteria you choose. All groups and appliances are contained in the root default Global group. The SCC supports up to 1500 appliance groups.

If you have a deployment of 1500 or more appliances, you might experience delays in legacy and hybrid networking pushes and during the initial upgrade of the software.

Appliance policies are a set of configuration settings for an appliance or an appliance group. All policy configurations from the Global group are inherited by all child groups and individual appliances. You can apply a policy to an appliance group and push configuration changes to members of a group with a single action. To modify configurations, you can apply different policies at the group or appliance level. For greater flexibility, you can configure policies to inherit some feature-set values from the parent group but override others. For detailed information about adding and configuring policies, see Managing application policies.

The Appliances page lists all managed appliances and appliance groups. The data from managed appliances is cached by the SCC every five minutes. Alarms poll the cached data every five minutes; therefore, the data can lag up to ten minutes between the event happening on the managed appliance and the SCC triggering an alarm. You can view these details for each listed item:

• Groups and Managed Appliances—Lists individual appliances and appliance groups. You can expand listed items to view their details.

• Connection—Indicates the current connection status for the SCC and the appliance and displays the alarm status for the appliance. The status represents the most severely triggered alarm. If two equally severe alarms have been triggered, the status representing the newer alarm is displayed. Click the error message to go to the Appliance Details page where the appliance alarms and their status are listed.

• Branch managed—Indicates whether the item is managed individually at the branch office (you can’t manage this appliance from the SCC).

• Push recommended—Indicates that the appliance configuration is out of synchronization with the relevant SCC policies, and that a policy push from the SCC to the appliance is recommended.