Cisco Cisco Email Security Appliance C160 Mode D'Emploi

The Cisco IronPort centralized management feature (available via feature key) allows you to manage and 
configure multiple appliances at the same time, reducing administration time and ensuring a consistent 
configuration across your network. You do not need to purchase additional hardware for managing 
multiple appliances. The centralized management feature provides increased reliability, flexibility, and 
scalability within your network, allowing you to manage globally while complying with local policies.

A cluster is defined as a set of machines that share configuration information. Within the cluster, 
machines (Cisco IronPort appliances) are divided into groups; every cluster will contain at least one 
group. A given machine is a member of one and only one group. An administrator user can configure 
different elements of the system on a cluster-wide, group-wide, or per-machine basis, enabling the 
segmentation of Cisco IronPort appliances based on network, geography, business unit, or other logical 
relationships. 

Clusters are implemented as a peer-to-peer architecture; there is no master/slave relationship within a 
cluster. You may log into any machine to control and administer the cluster. (Some configuration 
commands, however, are limited. See 

The user database is shared across all machines in the cluster. That is, there will be only one set of users 
and one administrator user (with the associated passwords) for an entire cluster. All machines that join 
a cluster will share a single administrator password which is referred to as the admin password of the 
cluster.

Topics discussed in this chapter include:

Machines in a cluster must have resolvable hostnames in DNS. Alternatively, you can use IP 
addresses instead, but you may not mix the two.

See 

. Cluster communication is normally initiated using 

the DNS hostnames of the machines.