Managing Appliances

Note: SCC 9.0 introduced the concept of sites, networks, and uplinks to create a topology for deployments of Riverbed appliances. Sites, networks, and uplinks are required in 9.0 or later for path selection, simplified QoS, and the secure transport features. For detailed information about configuring sites, networks, and uplinks, see Managing Interceptor Clusters. For detailed information about migrating appliances to sites and networks, see Migrating Appliances to Sites.

Organizing remote appliances into appliance groups enables 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 256 appliance groups.

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 Path Selection.

The Appliances page contains an Appliance/Group table that 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 up to ten minutes between the event happening on the managed appliance and the SCC triggering an alarm. The Appliance/Group table varies according to the operation you have chosen to perform. This table is an example of the common columns that appear.

Control	Description
Groups and Managed Appliances	Lists individual appliances or by appliance group membership. • Click the + next to the appliance group name to expand or collapse the child groups or appliances. • Click the > next to the appliance group name to expand or collapse the page to assign policies or edit group properties. • Click the > next to the appliance name to expand or collapse the page to add or remove policies, configure appliance policies, edit appliance settings, run appliance utilities (that is, reconnect and change the serial number), and view inherited policies.
Product/Model	Displays the appliance type (for example, SteelHead, SteelHead EX, Interceptor, or SteelFusion) and the 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. • Under Connection, click the error message to go to the Appliance Details page where the appliance alarms and their status are listed.
Cluster	Specifies the appliance is part of a cluster.
Branch Managed	Specifies the appliance is managed individually at the branch office. You cannot manage this SteelHead from the SCC.
Auto-Configure	Specifies that a policy push will occur automatically the next time the appliance connects.
Push Recommended	Specifies that the configuration shared by this appliance and the SCC has changed and a push is required to synchronize the appliance.
Policies	Displays the policies assigned to the group.
Site	Displays the site that this appliance belongs to.
Time Zone	Displays the time zone for the appliance: for example US/Pacific.