Centralised Management & Reporting

The SonicWALL GMS Virtual Appliance and the SonicWALL ViewPoint Virtual Appliance each include a software appliance that has already been pre-installed and pre-configured for virtual environments, and allow for the secure and easy deployment of a Global Management System (GMS) solution and a ViewPoint solution, respectively.

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) can deploy SonicWALL virtual appliances at their Network Operations Center (NOC) to offer private cloud offerings to their customers. As such, SonicWALL Virtual Appliances enable MSPs to increase their competitive edge by passing the cost benefits of virtualization on to their small- to medium-sized business (SMB) customers. In this regard, SonicWALL is leading the industry in providing affordable virtualized security services to the SMB marketplace.

SonicWALL® Virtual Appliances reduce complexity, ease administration, consolidate resources, optimize performance, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

SonicWALL Global Management System Virtual Appliance.

The SonicWALL® Global Management System (GMS™), which is deployable as software, hardware or a virtual appliance, provides organizations, distributed enterprises and service providers with a powerful and intuitive solution to centrally manage and rapidly deploy SonicWALL firewall, anti-spam, backup and recovery, and secure remote access solutions. SonicWALL GMS also provides centralized real-time monitoring, and comprehensive policy and compliance reporting. For enterprise customers, SonicWALL GMS streamlines security policy management and appliance deployment, minimizing administration overhead. For Service Providers, SonicWALL GMS simplifies the security management of multiple clients and creates additional revenue opportunities. A GMS system can use clustering for redundancy and scalability. A GMS Virtual Appliance can work alongside other software and appliance agents to form one logical system at the application level.

SonicWALL ViewPoint Virtual Appliance.

The SonicWALL® ViewPoint™ Virtual Appliance is an easy-to-use Web-based reporting tool that provides administrators with instant insight into the health of their network including both performance and security. ViewPoint helps organizations recognize suspicious activity and enhance employee productivity by providing summaries of network attacks and reports on user behavior that identify time-wasting and bandwidth-intensive activities. Aggregate reports for all firewalls on the network allow organizations to understand their Internet bandwidth usage and plan for future capacity needs. ViewPoint allows multiple administrators to log in and view firewall activity reports.

Features and benefits.

Ideal for SMBs, Enterprises and MSPs

• Significant savings to large distributed enterprises are achieved through economies-of-scale, for lower total cost of ownership (TCO)
• Improved MSP competitiveness is achieved by increasing the efficiency and profitability of offering cloud-based services and easily spinning off new deployments with minimal incremental investment
• An ideal delivery system for IT Solution Providers, SonicWALL Virtual Appliances can help avoid hardware customs and duties, and streamline “try before you buy” promotions
• Virtualized security for SMBs can now be delivered as an efficient and affordable cloud-based service or as a virtual environment on the private LAN

The best of both worlds: virtualization and a hardened appliance.

• Reduced complexity through virtualization simplifies solution selection, integration and ongoing support
• Easy migration minimizes deployment costs by allowing administrators to simply move a snapshot of a virtual environment to new physical server infrastructure
• Resource consolidation reduces costs by running multiple operating systems and applications on a single computer
• Hardware consolidation reduces capital expenditures, requires less administration and increases energy efficiency
• Hardened SonicLinux OS prohibits users from tampering with the underlying integrity of the Virtual Appliances
• Performance-optimized architecture activates only necessary processes
• Pre-configured virtual machine has no professional service fees and no hidden costs

Deployment options.

ViewPoint offers two deployment options:

• Software agent deployed on a third-party Windows server
• Virtual agent deployed as a virtual appliance deployed in a VMware environment

GMS offers three deployment options:

• Software agent deployed on a third-party Windows server
• Hardware agent deployed as a SonicWALL® Universal Management Appliance (UMA) EM5000
• Virtual agent deployed as a virtual appliance deployed in a VMware environment

A GMS system typically runs on one server or agent. For larger deployments and for scalability and redundancy, one logical GMS system can be deployed on multiple agents or servers. Customers can use one or more of the three available agent types within the same deployment.  

Licensing.

There are no separate SKUs for the GMS Virtual Appliance and the ViewPoint Virtual Appliance.

The GMS Virtual Appliance release is available for download for all GMS and UMA customers. There is no separate SKU for the GMS Virtual Appliance; if you have registered a GMS software (base) license or a SonicWALL Universal Management Appliance and have an active support contract, you are licensed to download and deploy the GMS Virtual Appliance. Similarly, the ViewPoint Virtual Appliance release is available for all existing ViewPoint customers with an active support contract.