Scaling Dell SonicWALL GMS Deployments

GMS is designed to be highly scalable to support service providers and enterprise customers with large numbers of SonicWALL appliances.

GMS offers a distributed management architecture, consisting of multiple servers, multiple consoles and several agents. Each agent server can manage a number of SonicWALL appliances. Additional capacity can be added to the management system by adding new agent servers. This distributed architecture also provides redundancy and load balancing, assuring reliable connections to the SonicWALL appliances under management.

In the distributed architecture, the console server provides the user a single interface to the management system. Each agent server can manage a number of SonicWALL appliances, depending on the SonicWALL GMS gateway that resides between the agent server and the SonicWALL appliances and the amount of syslog traffic from the remotely managed appliances.

•	The SonicWALL GMS gateway that resides between a GMS agent server and the SonicWALL appliances provides secure communications.

•	Each SonicWALL appliance can have a primary agent server and a standby server. Each agent server can be a primary server for certain SonicWALL appliances and a standby server for other SonicWALL appliances.

•	Configuration of and changes to the GMS and the SonicWALL appliances are written to the database.

•	The users at the Admin Workstations can access the GMS management interface through a Web browser (HTTP) from any location. The GMS management interface can also be securely accessed using SSL.

•	The SonicWALL GMS console server can also be an agent server.