About Managed Appliances
  
About Managed Appliances
You can manage remote appliances and configure appliance groups under Manage > Topology: Appliances. Appliance groups and policies facilitate centralized configuration, management, and reporting of your 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 over 1500 managed 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 About Policies.
SCC uses the concepts of sites, networks, and uplinks to create deployment topologies of Riverbed appliances. Sites, networks, and uplinks are required for path selection, simplified QoS, and secure transport features. See About Sites, Networks, Uplinks, and Regions and About migrating appliances to sites.
The Appliances page displays all appliances and appliance groups managed by the SCC. 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 a few minutes between the event happening on the managed appliance and the SCC triggering an alarm. This information is displayed for each listed item:
• Groups and Managed Appliances—Lists appliance groups and individual appliances. Expand an entry to access its policies and other settings.
• Product/Model—Displays appliance type and model number.
• Connection—Specifies 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. You can click the error message to go to the Appliance Details page where the appliance alarms and their status are listed.
• Cluster—Indicates whether the appliance is part of a cluster.
• Branch managed—Indicates whether the appliance is managed individually at the branch office (you can’t manage this appliance from the SCC).
• Auto-configure—Indicates that a policy push will occur automatically the next time the appliance connects to the SCC.
• Push recommended—Indicates that the appliance configuration is not synchronized with the SCC policies.
• Policies—Displays the policies assigned to the group or appliance.
• Site—Displays the site to which the group or appliance belongs.
• Time zone—Displays the time zone for the appliance.
The Interceptor and the Client Accelerator have limited functionality in the Appliance/Group table.
Appliances must be registered with the SCC before you can monitor and manage them with the SCC. SteelHeads are designed to send a registration request periodically to the SCC so that they’re automatically registered. If can take up to an hour for all registered SteelHeads to appear in the Appliances page. An unregistered SteelHead appears on the Appliances page with the error “NO ADDRESS SPECIFIED.” You can manually add the SteelHead in the Appliances page.
If you have SteelHeads that are behind a firewall you can run a CLI command that creates an SSL authorized port. For detailed information about adding an authorized port using the CLI, see About connecting to managed appliances through a firewall.
To view how many SteelHeads an SCC can manage, go to Knowledge Base article S14106.