About SteelCentral Controller for SteelHead
The SteelCentral Controller for SteelHead (SCC) provides centralized control and management of your Riverbed products that optimize and enhance application performance.
The SCC enables you to configure, monitor, upgrade, and troubleshoot Riverbed products, including SteelHead CX appliances, SteelHead EX appliances, SteelHead Interceptor appliances, Cloud Accelerator, SaaS Accelerator, and Client Accelerator.
The SCC provides these centralized management capabilities:
• Streamlines configuration and ongoing management of large Riverbed product deployments.
• Simplifies configuration management with flexible group features to deploy consistent configurations to a specific location, business function, or a preferred grouping.
• Provides cluster management for the SteelHead Interceptor appliances.
• Facilitates configuration by automatically deriving all application path possibilities across all SteelHeads in your deployment.
…and these aggregate and granular reporting capabilities:
• Provides flexible reporting on performance improvements for the entire SteelHead deployment, specific groups, or individual SteelHeads.
• Reports on bandwidth usage, bandwidth compression, and specific performance of particular ports, applications, and appliances.
• Displays a centralized view of the overall health of all appliances in your deployment.
…and these visibility, control, and optimization capabilities:
• Provides global views by sites and applications.
• Using the path selection feature, dynamically selects the best path based on application-aware, business intent-based policies and network availability.
• Delivers improved visibility with end-user monitoring for all optimized traffic, including optimized web and SaaS applications.
SCC deployment
About application performance and policies
The SCC also provides visibility into how applications are performing and reporting metrics, such as traffic levels, application throughput performance, and TCP session flow characteristics. These metrics help diagnose problems and maintain control over your application infrastructure.
Using the SCC, you can define application policies based on business requirements, enabling you to easily leverage and control hybrid networks for accelerated application delivery. The SCC is prepopulated with known applications, allows the addition of custom applications, and provides application groups to easily enable business-intent policy definition. Based on your defined application groups, the SCC quickly derives all possible paths based on path availability and enables you to prioritize, secure, and deliver critical applications over the faster networks and less critical, recreational applications and bulk backups over the internet.
This solution simplifies application and path management, ensures service-level delivery for business-critical applications, and increases end-user productivity. The SCC manages hundreds of applications, including policy configuration, reporting, and troubleshooting.
For detailed information, see the SteelCentral Controller for SteelHead User Guide and the SteelCentral Controller for SteelHead Deployment Guide.
About system requirements and cross-product compatibility
SCC component | Hardware and software requirements |
SCC appliance | 19-inch (483-mm) two-port or four-post rack. |
SCC Management Console | The SCC has been tested with Mozilla Firefox Extended Support Release version 38 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 11. When you upgrade your software, clear the browser cache and cookies to ensure the user interface displays correctly. JavaScript and cookies must be enabled in your web browser. |
As a result of updating the version of Secure Shell (SSH), older releases of SCC cannot connect to newer software on managed appliances. If you plan to upgrade your appliances, upgrade the SCC first to avoid disconnections.
About compatibility with SteelHead CX
In general, each SCC version can manage the features found in the similarly numbered RiOS version. For optimum compatibility, we recommend aligning the SCC and SteelHead versions.
The SCC can manage features where they occur in a previous RiOS version. For example, with SCC managing an earlier-version SteelHead, the SCC can manage the only features available in the version of software on the SteelHead.
In general, there is no forward compatibility for SteelHeads; the SCC must be equal to or later than the SteelHead RiOS version. For example, SCC 9.8 can support SteelHead RiOS 8.6 or later up to 9.8 only.
To view how many SteelHeads an SCC can manage, go to Knowledge Base article
S14106.
About compatibility with SteelHead EX
SCC 9.8 and later support configuration and monitoring for SteelHead EX 3.5.3 and later.
About compatibility with SteelHead Interceptor
SCC 9.8 and later support configuration and monitoring for SteelHead Interceptor 4.0 and later.
Pushing configurations to appliances is limited to Xbridge, system settings, security settings, and in-path and load-balancing rules for clusters.
About compatibility with Client Accelerator
SCC 9.8 and later support monitoring only for Client Accelerator 4.0 and later.
About compatibility with SteelFusion Core
SCC 9.8 and later support monitoring only for SteelFusion Core 4.0 and later.
About compatibility with SteelFusion Edge
SCC 9.8 and later support monitoring and partial configuration for SteelFusion Edge 4.0 and later. SCC enables you to configure and monitor SteelHead (RiOS) features except web proxy. You cannot configure ESXi from the SCC.
About legacy policy push restrictions
These restrictions only apply to policies configured with software versions prior to SCC 9.0.x.
SCC feature | SteelHead CX software | SteelHead EX software |
Legacy Outbound QoS (Basic) | 8.6.x only supported 9.0 and later not supported | 3.5.3 only supported 3.6.x and later not supported |
Legacy Outbound QoS (Advanced) | 8.6.x only supported 9.0 and later not supported | 3.5.3 only supported 3.6.x and later not supported |
Legacy Outbound QoS Interfaces | 9.0 and later not supported | 3.6.x and later not supported |
Legacy Inbound QoS | 9.0 and later not supported | 3.6.x and later not supported |
Legacy Inbound QoS Interfaces | 9.0 and later not supported | 3.6.x and later not supported |
Legacy Path Selection | 8.6.x only supported 9.0 and later not supported | 3.5.3 only supported 3.6.x and later not supported |
About firewall requirements
These ports must be open for the SCC to function properly:
• TCP ports 9443 and 443 for HTTPS communication. SCC 9.0.0 and later use port 443 for the REST API SSL key exchange between the SCC and SteelHeads. After the certificate exchange is successful, an OCC channel is established between the SteelHead and the SCC on port 9443; thereafter, the SCC uses port 9443 to communicate with the SteelHeads.
• TCP port 22 for CLI communication.
• If the network is public, use UDP port 4500 for encryption services.
• If you plan to configure SaaS acceleration on managed SteelHeads and SteelFusion Edges using SCC, use TCP port 3900 for registering SCC with SCM.
Because optimization between SteelHeads typically takes place over a secure WAN, it is not necessary to configure company firewalls to support SteelHead-specific ports.
About scaling best practices
The SCC can manage up to 2500 appliances. A SteelCentral Controller for SteelHead (Virtual Edition) instance must be equal to or later than the model 1000 to support 2500 appliances.
Adhere to these guidelines for deployments with 1500 or more appliances:
• Legacy policy pushes must be limited to 200 appliance at a time. This process may take several minutes for a larger set of appliances.
• Hybrid network policy pushes are limited to 500 appliances at a time. This process may take several minutes for a larger set of appliances.
• If a legacy and hybrid networking policy push must be performed together, then the push is limited to 200 appliances at a time. This process may take several minutes for a larger set of appliances.
• When upgrading large deployments, the initial upgrade may take several hours.
• If your deployment contains more than 1000 appliances, backups will take more than three hours.