Understanding the Services Director
The Services Director enables you to deploy, configure and manage your Traffic Manager instances. Specifically, you can:
- License your Traffic Manager instances.
- Register externally-deployed Traffic Manager instances.
- Configure the use of an external instance host by the Services Director.
- Deploy Traffic Manager instances using a configured instance host.
- Deploy cloud-based Traffic Manager instances on AWS.
- Transition deployed Traffic Manager instances through a lifecycle.
- Start, stop and restart your Services Director service.
- 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 Traffic Manager passwords using encryption based on a Master Password.
- Perform health and monitoring reporting.
- Perform usage metering.
- Generate and view analytics information for the vTMs in the estate of the Services Director.
- Generate system logs and system dumps.
Support for individual functions depends on your license type, see Overview of Services Director Licensing.
Services Director Customer Types
The Services Director supports two kinds of customers.
Cloud Service Provider (CSP) customers are typically service providers and hosting organizations who want to use metered usage data to bill their end users. They can offer unlimited registration, deployment and licensing of Traffic Manager instances, and there are no limits on the bandwidth or Services Director features they can consume. Services Director collects metered usage data on a regular basis, and accumulates this for eventual download and end user billing. The same metering data is sent to Ivanti to bill the CSP customer.
Enterprise customers are typically end users of Services Director who want to pre-pay all usage charges. They can allocate features and bandwidth up to the capacity they have purchased as Bandwidth Packs and Add-On Packs. At this point, additional Bandwidth Packs and Feature Packs can be purchased from Ivanti to allow further allocation. No metering is supported, and Ivanti does not bill the Enterprise customer.
See Overview of Services Director Licensing for a description of the software license types that support these customers.
In this manual, a section that is relevant to only one customer license type will state this in its heading. For example:
Services Director Form-Factors
The Services Director is available as two form-factors:
- Software form-factor - this is an installation of Services Director on Ubuntu or RHEL/CentOS. This can be controlled using a Representational State Transfer (REST) API only.
This is the primary configuration described in this manual.
- Virtual appliance form-factor - this is an installation of Services Director Virtual Appliance (Services Director VA) on any supported platform. This can be accessed using a REST API, a graphical user interface (GUI) and a Command-Line Interface (CLI).
This is NOT the focus of this manual.
For detailed information about the Services Director VA, see the Services Director Getting Started Guide.
For detailed information about the CLI, see the Services Director Command Reference.
The Services Director stores information about deployed Traffic Manager instances, including the resources that it needs to manage in a MySQL inventory database.
Supported actions are triggered through the Services Director REST API, through a REST API instance resource. You issue a REST API request for the Services Director server to update the inventory database, which in turn queues an action to implement the requested operation before responding to the request. To avoid time-out issues, the response is returned before the action completes. After the action completes, the inventory database is updated. There is no progress callback from the Services Director; you must poll the Services Director to check for the status of the action. For detailed information about REST API resources, see Using the ServURI Root Partsices Director REST API.
Working with an Instance Host
An instance host is required for the creation/deployment of Traffic Managers by the Services Director. The instance host is a configured Linux machine - this is a generic Linux machine that has been configured to run as an instance host. This machine can be either virtual or physical, and can run either Ubuntu or RHEL/CentOS.
An instance host can be used with both Services Director form-factors:
- A software form-factor Services Director supports the use of a Linux machine as an instance host. This is described in Using an Instance Host with a Software Services Director.
- The Services Director VA supports the use of a configured Linux machine as an instance host. This is described in Using an Instance Host with a Services Director VA.
For detailed information about the Services Director VA, see the Services Director Getting Started Guide.
For detailed information about the CLI, see the Services Director Command Reference.
The Services Director stores information about deployed Traffic Manager instances, including the resources that it needs to manage in a MySQL inventory database.
Supported actions are triggered through the Services Director REST API, through a REST API instance resource. You issue a REST API request for the Services Director server to update the inventory database, which in turn queues an action to implement the requested operation before responding to the request. To avoid time-out issues, the response is returned before the action completes. After the action completes, the inventory database is updated. There is no progress callback from the Services Director; you must poll the Services Director to check for the status of the action. For detailed information about REST API resources, see Using the ServURI Root Partsices Director REST API.
Using the Advanced User Guide
This manual guides you through the installation and configuration of your software form-factor Services Director. It provides a reference guide for specific functional areas.
The structure of the manual is as follows:
- Managing Services Director Licensing - This chapter describes Services Director licenses and how to install them.
- Installing and Configuring the Software Services Director - This chapter describes how to install and configure the Services Director.
- Using an Instance Host with a Software Services Director - This chapter describes how to deploy Traffic Manager instances with a combination of an instance host and the software form-factor Services Director.
- Using an Instance Host with a Services Director VA - This chapter describes how to deploy Traffic Manager instances with a combination of an instance host and the Services Director VA.
- Registering Externally-Deployed Traffic Managers - This chapter describes how to register externally-deployed Traffic Manager instances when using an instance host on either the software form-factor Services Director or the Services Director VA.
- Using the ServURI Root Partsices Director REST API - This chapter describes the REST API, which is the primary means of communicating with the Services Director for all configuration and control purposes.
- Metering and Monitoring the Services Director - This chapter describes how to configure metering and monitoring for the Services Director.
- Upgrading the Services Director - This chapter describes the process for upgrading the Services Director VA.
- Working with the Master Password - This chapter describes how to store, change and reset the Master Password.
- Appendix: Deploying for Redundancy - This appendix describes how to implement high availability configurations for the Services Director.
- Appendix: Managing the Services Director Using the CLI - This appendix describes the configuration of the Services Director using the Command-Line Interface (CLI) only.
- Appendix: Email Notifications Generated By Services Director - This appendix describes the e-mails that can be generated by the Services Director.
Using INSTALLROOT in This Guide
This guide uses the term INSTALLROOT to refer to the location of the Services Director software installation directory. It is not an environment variable and is used in this guide for consistency only.
Previous versions of the Services Director used a deprecated environment variable, $SSCHOME, for this purpose. If this is still set in your environment, you must explicitly unset it prior to installing or upgrading the Services Director.
The default installation locations for the Services Director software package on the supported platforms are:
- Ubuntu: /opt/riverbed_ssc_19.1/
- RHEL/CentOS: /opt/riverbed-ssc/