2-3
Installing Management Center for Cisco Security Agents 5.2
78-17916-01
Chapter 2 Deployment Planning
Scalable Deployments
• How long should a pilot program run? Basically, the deploying and tuning of
policies is an iterative process. Initially, you will have a great deal of event
log noise to parse. You must examine the data coming in and edit your
policies accordingly.
Details:
–
Although every site is different, it would not be unusual to run a pilot
program for approximately 90 days. All possible application usage
should take place within the pilot time frame. It is important to note that
this recommended time frame allows you to exercise applications, their
deployment and usage, within an entire fiscal quarter. The idea being,
every application you use and every manner is which you use it will
occur during this piloting period.
Scalable Deployments
The Cisco Security Agent V5.x release offers scaling of agents to 100,000
systems. To reach this deployment number, there are recommended multi-tiered
CSA MC server system hardware, CPU, and memory requirements. Please refer
to the following section.

Hardware Sizing

This section provides three server configuration examples and three hardware
configuration examples. The server and hardware combinations will be charted in
three tables providing information on how many agents can be deployed using
each server and hardware configuration combination. This should give you an
idea of how to configure CSA to scale up to a 100,000 agent deployment.
For the purpose of this guide, we will use three server configuration examples.
Server Configurations:
1. Single server
2. Two servers: one server for polling and configuration, one database server
3. Three servers: one server for polling, one server for configuration, one
database server
We will use the following hardware configurations.