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Step 2: Plan your Virtual Appliance Deployment Strategy​

  • Updated

The network subnets, and IPs identified in the previous step determine the target environment(s) for deploying your CloudSphere Appliance(s). CloudSphere virtual appliances scan your Windows and Linux devices on your network using the standard ports. The next step is to plan the deployment of the CloudSphere Appliances. 

The number and location of CloudSphere Appliances that will be required to be installed are determined by factors including:

Network Location (Firewalls)

The CloudSphere Appliance must be deployed in a network segment that can route to endpoint devices of the target network segments. Unique ACLs on your routers or switches must allow the virtual appliance to communicate with your endpoints. We recommend deploying an additional appliance within an un-reachable network than tweaking the ACL firewalls and creating additional routes.

To access the endpoints and subnets via the virtual appliance, ensure that the following meet the pre-requisites:

  • Routes 

  • Network Firewall rules 

  • ACL account for ports and protocols from the appliances to the endpoints

To know more, check out Scanning: Network pre-requisites

Discovery Volume

The Discovery Volume is the number of endpoints you are trying to discover. In case the number of endpoints is large, deploying additional appliances will reduce the scan time.

Physical & Geo disparate Location

For physically and geographically disparate environments, it may be beneficial to have separate appliances per environment or Geolocation. This could be because:

  • There is no VPN or connection between the sites.

  • Network Latency is high.

  • We want to avoid relying on the single connection between the sites and transferring the scan data from the endpoints to the virtual appliance.

We recommend you use separate appliances within the same region as the target endpoints to avoid introducing latency during scanning cross-region or distant locations.

vCenter Scanning

If you need to collect the vCenter metric, we recommend using a separate virtual appliance for vCenter scanning. vCenter scanning pulls in ESX resources and performance-related data directly via vCenter APIs. 

Note: Scanning vCenter is optional and used if:

  1. You want to retrieve your entire VMs and ESX server inventory information. 

  2. You want to collect vCenter metrics. 

VMs in the vCenter environment can be scanned using our agentless technology, and therefore if you do not require vCenter metrics, this specific mechanism is not required.

The article CAM Appliance Pre-Reqs (Summary) will provide you with a comprehensive summary of the prerequisite.

By now, you have an estimate of the number of virtual appliances required to cover the endpoints you want to scan. Once you've your appliance deployment strategy ready, it's time to proceed with Step 3 - Get Ready For Appliance Deployment.

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