This chapter includes these sections:

The SCC provides centralized control and management of your Riverbed SteelHead 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, SteelFusion Core and Edge appliances, SteelHead Interceptor appliances, SteelHead (in the cloud), SteelHead SaaS, and SteelHead Mobile.

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.

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. See Knowledge Base article S27759 for complete details. 

SCC 9.8 supports configuration and monitoring for SteelHead CX 8.6 and later.

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 9.8 managing SteelHead 9.7 systems, the SCC can manage the 9.7 features on the SteelHeads only.

In general there is no forward compatibility for SteelHeads, the SCC must be equal to or higher than the SteelHead RiOS version. That is SCC 9.8 can support SteelHead RiOS 8.6 or later up to 9.8 only.

The SCC version must always be equal to higher than the SteelHead version. For example, SCC 9.7 can manage the SteelHead 9.2 and SteelHead 9.5, but not the SteelHead 9.8.

SCC 9.8 supports configuration and monitoring for SteelHead EX 3.5.3 and later.

This table shows the supported and recommend SCC versions for SteelHead EX releases.

SCC 9.8 supports 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.

SCC 9.8 supports monitoring only for SteelHead Mobile 4.0 and later.

SCC 9.8 supports monitoring only for SteelFusion Core 4.0 and later.

SCC 9.8 supports monitoring and partial configuration for SteelFusion Edge 4.0 and later. SCC lets you configure and monitor SteelHead (RiOS) features except web proxy. You cannot configure ESXi from the SCC.

These restrictions only apply to policies configured with software versions prior to SCC 9.0.x.

These ports must be open for the SCC to function properly:

Because optimization between SteelHeads typically takes place over a secure WAN, it is not necessary to configure company firewalls to support SteelHead-specific ports.

The SCC supports these networking standards. An SCC with a Gigabit Ethernet card supports jumbo frames on in-path and primary ports.

The SCC ports support these connection types and speeds.

The SCC supports VLAN tagging (IEEE 802.3 - 2008). It does not support the Inter-Switch Link (ISL) protocol.

The SCC autonegotiates speed and duplex mode for all data rates and supports full-duplex mode and flow control (IEEE 802.3 - 2008).

This product supports a proprietary Riverbed MIB accessible through SNMP. SNMPv1 (RFCs 1155, 1157, 1212, and 1215), SNMPv2c (RFCs 1901, 2578, 2579, 2580, 3416, 3417, and 3418), and SNMPv3 are supported, although some MIB items might only be accessible through SNMPv2 and SNMPv3.

SNMP support enables the product to be integrated into network management systems such as Hewlett-Packard OpenView Network Node Manager, BMC Patrol, and other SNMP-based network management tools.

These new features are available with SCC 9.8.

SAML 2.0 is an XML standard that acts as an authentication interface between a SCC and an identity provider (IdP). You can use the IdP to provide additional requirements for authentication, which can be a multi-factor authentication based on common access card (CAC), personal identity verification (PIV), and more. With SCC 9.8, you can perform a policy push to enable SAML on multiple appliances, provided you have already configured IdP in each appliance.

See the SteelCentral Controller for SteelHead User Guide for details.

SCC-VE appliances can now be installed on ESXi 6.5 virtual machines (VMs).

You can now specify IPv6 addresses for traffic statistics collection, when adding a flow collector, filters, and subnet side rules for NetFlow and SteelFlow data collection and export. For many deployments, this enhancement enables a Riverbed WAN optimization design with SteelHead, SteelCentral Controller for SteelHead (SCC), and Interceptor to run in a pure IPv6 environment.

See the SteelCentral Controller for SteelHead User Guide for details.

These enhancements were made in RiOS 9.8:

See the SteelCentral Controller for SteelHead User Guide and the Riverbed Command-Line Interface Reference Manual for more details.

The SCC can manage up to 2500 appliances. The models 1000, 8151, and 8152 support 2500 appliances. The SCC-VE (virtual models 8151 and 8152) configuration must be equivalent, or better, to the model 1000 to support 2500 appliances.

Adhere to these guidelines for deployments with 1500 or more appliances:

You can only directly upgrade the SCC to the next major version or to another minor version within a major version. Do not skip intermediate major versions. Multiversion upgrades and downgrades can result in database incompatibilities, potentially leading to data corruption.

Upon upgrading, clear your browser cache and cookies to ensure that the SCC Management Console displays correctly. Also upon upgrading, make sure none of the processes have exited due to an error. All new and existing processes should run as expected. Some processes are dependent on other processes so they might take time to run at start up.

With SCC 9.0 and later, policy push configurations with the SteelHeads running RiOS 8.0 or later (that is, SteelHead CXs running 8.0+ and SteelHead EXs running 3.6 or later) are not supported. Earlier version appliances are still connected and the SCC still manages health and alarms for these appliances. The SCC 9.0 and later do not support policy pushes for SteelHead EX 2.0 and earlier and SteelHead CXs 8.0 and earlier.

Consider these guidelines before upgrading SCC:

Follow these steps to upgrade your software. These instructions assume you are familiar with the SCC, the CLI, and the SCC Management Console.

If you are downgrading to a previous version of the RiOS software, you must downgrade to a version of the software that has previously run on your system.

You can retrieve and manage Riverbed licenses using the Riverbed Licensing Portal. After you retrieve a license key from the Riverbed Licensing Portal, you need to install it to activate your appliance.

The Riverbed Licensing Portal requires a unique identifier to retrieve a license, such as a serial number, a license request key (activation code), or a token. This task describes how to retrieve a license using a serial number.

Because each license key is generated for a specific appliance, ensure that you install your license key on the appropriate appliance.

You can also install a license key using the SCC command-line interface (CLI).