Description

Businesses are choosing to deploy their computing, storage, and network infrastructure using virtual devices because of benefits such as deployment flexibility, increased server utilization, and ease of management. Cisco ASAv provides security in a virtual machine (VM) form factor to address security needs in virtual environments. Cisco ASAv runs as a VM inside a hypervisor in a virtual host. Most of the features that are supported on a physical Cisco ASA by Cisco ASA software are supported on Cisco ASAv as well, except for clustering and multiple contexts. Cisco ASAv supports site-to-site VPN, remote-access VPN and clientless VPN functionalities as supported by physical Cisco ASA devices.

Cisco ASAv uses Cisco Smart Licensing to validate its entitlements. Cisco Smart Licensing makes it easier to deploy, manage, and track virtual instances of Cisco ASAv running on customer premises.

Features:

• Uniform Security across Deployment Domains
  Cisco ASAv provides uniform security across physical and virtual deployment domains with multiple hypervisors. Increasingly, customers are deploying some parts of an application on physical infrastructure and others on virtual infrastructure. Even with virtual infrastructure, customers use multiple hypervisors to deploy their applications. Cisco ASAv, along with Cisco ASA, normalizes the deployment options such that one security policy can be deployed for both physical and virtual appliances.
• Ease of Management
  Cisco ASAv offers the representational state transfer (REST) API, an HTTP-based interface that offers capabilities to manage the device, including those for changing security policies and monitoring status. The REST API allows Cisco ASA to be introduced into software-defined networking (SDN) environments and to be used with custom policy-orchestration systems easily.
• Ease of Provisioning
  Cisco ASAv can be provisioned within a matter of minutes with a predetermined configuration to quickly deploy security services to match the speed of application deployment. With Smart Licensing, the entitlements can be automatically obtained by Cisco ASAv while providing a single holistic view of resources being consumed within an enterprise.