Samara™ Central Management Console (CMC)

Software for Building a Centralized
Appliance Management Station

Managing geographically dispersed appliances can be a daunting task for your customers. Building a solution to help them manage their appliances can be just as overwhelming for appliance start-ups and vendors.

To help solve this challenge for appliance vendors, and as a result their customers, Tall Maple Systems developed Samara CMC, software for building a centralized appliance management station. Samara CMC allows you to easily build a product that enables your customers to securely configure, monitor and control Samara-based appliances deployed through out their network.

Samara CMC Overview

With Samara CMC, you'll have all the software you'll need to build a centralized appliance management station for your customers. Benefits of having Samara CMC for your customers include:

• A dedicated single appliance capable of supporting hundreds of devices worldwide over LANs and WANs
• Optimum control of appliances using command profiles, monitoring and scheduling features
• Timely, customized execution of management tasks
• The ability to issue large sets of commands to large groups of appliances quickly and easily; also, you can effect large configuration changes on a group of appliances by issuing only a small number of commands
• Execute commands directly to a single appliance or group of appliances
• Create command profiles either using the CLI or Web UI
• Securely communicate with appliances over the network using SSH
• Access appliances using configured passwords or host keys; manage host key distribution

Command Profiles

Samara CMC can manage appliances by applying a profile, a set of non-appliance specific configuration settings that can be used to similarly configure a group of appliances. When a profile is applied to an appliance or a group of appliances, certain configuration settings are maintained while others are cleared. For example, a profile will not change the IP address of a network interface. This functionality gives an administrator the ability to easily and quickly apply configuration changes to a large set of appliances with a small set of commands, issued from a central location. Profiles provide a mechanism to maintain a set of configuration commands over time that can be propagated when global/group changes are required. The profile is modified in one place (i.e. on the CMC) and pushed out into the network.

Direct Command Execution

Samara CMC also has the capability to manage appliances by directly executing commands interactively. Sets of appliances can be specified in groups, giving the administrator the ability to perform configuration and monitoring tasks on a per group basis. Appliance groups also provide flexibility to perform certain operations on one set of appliances, but not another. With direct command execution, the following types of operations are possible:

• Troubleshoot and correct configuration settings
• Reboot an appliance
• Perform software upgrades
• Collection and aggregation of appliance logs

Monitoring

Samara CMC also delivers single-point monitoring capabilities, helping an administrator perform audits to troubleshoot and diagnose problems, such as determining which software versions are running on remote appliances. All data collected through the Samara monitoring system can be collected for groups of appliances and displayed centrally.

Command Scheduling

Utilizing the Samara command scheduling functionality also makes it possible for all CMC functions to occur at a specified time. This allows a software upgrade to be performed during off-peak business hours, without requiring an administrator to manually execute this task. Many management tasks can be automated in this manner.

Samara CMC is licensed separately from Samara 2.0.

Samara Architecture Diagram