Management of Multiple Appliances

In all the discussion of deploying multiple appliances, I skipped over the assumption that they will all need to be managed. In most cases, I’m in favor of deploying ESAs in a flat, single-layer architecture with all appliances configured identically. Regardless of the deployment model, you will have two or more ESAs to manage.

The Cisco IronPort Centralized Management (CM) feature is ideal for managing multiple appliances in clusters as large as 20 ESAs. For four or more appliances, it’s imperative that you use this feature, not just because it’s tedious to make the same configuration on multiple machines, but that it’s impossible to be 100% consistent in making those changes on every ESA, every time; eventually, you will end up with configurations out of synch.