About This Guide

Services Director VA Overview

The Services Director Virtual Appliance (Services Director VA) enables you to configure and manage the Services Director as a virtual appliance. The Services Director VA provides a graphical user interface (GUI) that enables you to:

•License your Virtual Traffic Manager (vTM) instances.

•Register externally-deployed vTM instances.

•Configure the use of an external instance host by the Services Director.

•Deploy vTM instances using a configured instance host.

•Deploy cloud-based vTM instances on AWS.

•Transition deployed vTM instances through a lifecycle.

•Start, stop and restart your Services Director service.

•Implement user authentication for the Services Director and VTMs.

•Protect your instance configurations (on a cluster basis) by taking automated and manual backups.

•Protect your Services Director configuration using a backup system.

•Protect your vTM passwords using encryption based on a Master Password.

•Perform health and monitoring reporting.

•Configure vTM analytics for a vTM cluster, and view resulting analytics graphs.

•Perform usage metering.

•Generate system logs and system dumps.

Support for individual functions depends on your license type.

The GUI is the main interface for the Services Director VA. However, a Command-Line Interface (CLI) is also included. The CLI is described in the Pulse Secure Services Director Command Reference.

Using the Getting Started Guide

This guide takes you through the installation, configuration and use of your Services Director VA.

The structure of this guide is as follows:

•Preparing to Install the Services Director Virtual Appliance: Describes the general Services Director VA installation process. It references platform-specific processes across a number of chapters:

•Installing the Services Director VA on vSphere.

•Installing the Services Director VA on KVM-QEMU.

•Installing the Services Director VA on Amazon Web Services.

•Running the Services Director VA Setup Wizard.

•Updating Services Director VA Settings.

•Adding Virtual Traffic Managers to the Services Director: Describes the process of adding externally-deployed vTM instances to the Services Director VA. This includes manual registrations, the processing of self-registration requests, and the creation of cloud-based vTM instances.

The installation and configuration of an instance host, and the deployment of vTM instances is described in the Pulse Services Director Advanced User Guide.

•Working with Virtual Traffic Managers: Describes how vTM instances are represented in the Services Director VA, methods for affecting this representation, and the lifecycle of externally-deployed vTM instances.

The operation of traffic management and load balancing on individual vTM instances is not addressed by the Services Director. This requires use of a Pulse Secure Virtual Traffic Manager for each vTM instance.

•Working with Virtual Traffic Manager Clusters: Describes how vTM clusters and backups are used by both vTMs and the Services Director VA.

•Working with User Authentication: Describes how to configure user authentication for both vTMs and the Services Director VA.

•Working with vTM Analytics: Describes how to configure vTM analytics on the Services Director VA, and how to use the various analytics graph types.

•Working with High Availability: Describes how to operate a High Availability (HA) pair of Services Director VA nodes. This includes monitoring of status, error conditions, and methods for returning your HA pair to operation.

•Recovering from a Services Director Failure: Describes how to preserve the configuration of an HA pair, and how to recover a saved configuration for an existing Services Director VA. This also includes how to create a new Services Director VA from a saved configuration.

•Creating Services Director Reports: Describes how to generate and extract output from your Services Director VA. This includes metering logs and system logs.