The Imprivata Appliance

The Imprivata appliance is a dedicated virtual network appliance designed to provide robust service for users across a large or small network.

• One or more appliances on a LAN or WAN form an Imprivata site.

• One or more sites connected through a LAN or WAN make up an Imprivata enterprise.

You can host and manage Imprivata virtual appliances using VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization software. Imprivata virtual appliances hosted on these platforms are formatted using the industry-standard Open Virtualization Format (OVF).

You can also host and manage Imprivata virtual appliances on Nutanix and Microsoft Azure.

For more information about deploying an appliance, see:

• Deploy a VMware Appliance

• Deploy a Microsoft Hyper–V Appliance

• Deploy a Nutanix Appliance

• Deploy to a VMware ESX Thin-Provisioned Environment

• Deploy G4 Appliances on Azure

G4 Appliance Types

For G4 (fourth generation) appliances in an Imprivata G4 enterprise, there are two types of appliances: database appliances and service appliances. Some characteristics of G4 appliances and enterprises are:

• Both G4 appliances types service endpoint agent requests for authentication.

• A database appliance also hosts an instance of the enterprise database and contains all audit data. In a G4 enterprise, there is no longer a concept of an audit appliance.

• A G4 enterprise must have at least one database appliance, and typically has the allowed maximum of two database appliances.

• A G4 enterprise should have two database appliances to ensure database and audit continuity if one database appliance becomes unavailable. Auditing consumes network bandwidth, so one database appliance per site is enough for most enterprise needs.

  Database replication occurs only between the database appliances, not through service appliances, reducing network bandwidth use compared to a G3 enterprise.

• A G4 enterprise typically has at most the recommended maximum of four service appliances, and thus at most the recommended maximum of six appliances in total.

• The first two appliances you create for a G4 enterprise are database appliances. Thereafter, any additional appliances you create are service appliances.

  If for example, if you want to have one database appliance in each of two sites, create those database appliances for those sites before you create any service appliances.

• A best practice is to place service appliances in the same data center as a database appliance to reduce the time needed for the service appliances to service requests from endpoint agents.

• For a G4 enterprise spanning two data centers (on-premises or Azure-based), if one of the data centers goes down for a long period of time due to a disaster or other event, you should immediately add another database appliance to the surviving site.

The total number of appliances to deploy for an enterprise is discussed in the appliance deployment topics linked above.