This is the last section of a 2-part article series around virtual appliance and outlines what you should be aware of when deploying an appliance. Symantec have a number of appliances for products such as Symantec Endpoint Protection, Advanced Threat Protection and Secure Web Gateway which can be downloaded and installed on local infrastructure, or deployed from a marketplace on cloud providers such as AWS or Azure.
- When deploying a Symantec appliance, check and make sure your appliance can be deployed on your hypervisor of choice. If Hyper-V isn’t supported, then you’re going to have to make sure that you have a deployment option on a VM. By the same token, if you’re running a VMware 5.1 for instance, make sure the appliance supports being deployed on that particular version. If you don’t, you’re facing a failed deployment and a delay to bringing the application online as you upgrade your hosts.
- Make sure you have the resources to run the appliance. If your cluster is already running at 100%+ of capacity (vCPU/vRAM etc), deploying a potentially resource-intensive appliance is going to have an impact on all currently running services, to the detriment of the business.
- Check the prerequisites for networking, as some specific networking requirements might need to be addressed. Some might need separate virtual networks to be created in order to segregate the appliance, so create these first in order to successfully deploy the appliance. This is true for both onsite and cloud-based deployments.
- Check the version of appliance you’re downloading, and I would suggest downloading the latest version. This makes sure you are already on the latest version, and don’t need an almost immediate upgrade to bring you up to date. Running the latest version would be preferable unless there is some issue preventing you from doing so (ie. Issues with the latest version of the appliance).
I would also recommend having the Admin Guide and the installation guide on hand as these are very good sources of information to draw from. Do the necessary fact-finding and homework and make sure all your bases are covered before deploying the appliance. Whilst it might be easy to do so, having to redo an appliance deployment can become a pain, and this is what you should be steering away from.
Some of the various virtual appliances that Symantec have available are as follows:
- Symantec Endpoint Protection Security Virtual Appliance – integrates with VMware’s vShield Endpoint, and is installed on each ESXi host.
- Advanced Threat Protection – deployed on ESXi (check the networking requirements that need to be in place before installing the appliance).
- Virtual Secure Gateway Appliance – proxy solution built on BlueCoat technology.
Check on your cloud provider of choice’s marketplace to see what Symantec offerings are available for installation as well. Don’t forget, that even if they don’t have this available (ie. They only have a SaaS version) you’re still able to deploy the virtual appliance on your cloud infrastructure as long as it is shown as being supported.