Deploy Virtual Scanner Appliance

Before we go through the actual steps involved in the virtual scanner deployment, let us understand the licensing or cost aspect and the deployment recommendations.

Prerequisites

• The Virtual Scanner option must be turned on for your account. Contact Qualys Support or your Technical Account Manager if you want us to turn on this option.
• You must be a Manager or sub-user with permission to access the Manage virtual scanner appliances. This permission may be granted to Unit Managers.
• Your subscription may be configured to allow this permission to be granted to Scanners.

Cost and Licenses

Qualys Virtual Scanner Appliance is available as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) at AWS Marketplace, ready for customers to launch onto Amazon EC2-Classic and EC2-VPC.

There are two aspects to consider:

• Qualys costs for the virtual scanner license subscription.
• AWS costs for the computing resources to run the appliance as an EC2 Instance.

Qualys Cost

You must acquire a Qualys license for each virtual scanner appliance Instance you would like to run. This license is acquired from Qualys, not from AWS, and our scanner appliances are listed at AWS Marketplace with a BYOL (that means, Bring your own license) model accordingly. Each Qualys Virtual Scanner Appliance profile that you define in the Qualys Cloud Platform UI can consume a single virtual scanner appliance license. If you delete a virtual scanner appliance profile from your Qualys subscription, that license is freed up and immediately available for re-use.

Contact your Qualys Technical Account Manager or Qualys re-seller for a pricing quotation or to request an evaluation.

AWS Cost

Each virtual scanner appliance Instance launch into one of your own AWS accounts. You are responsible for paying AWS for the costs of running the appliance.

Those costs include:

• Compute Capacity based on instance type
• Storage
• Data transfer IN or OUT

The compute capacity charges (CPU, RAM) are overwhelmingly the largest part of the costs to run an Instance.

You are not required to keep your scanner appliance(s) running at all times. Any hours during which your Instance is Stopped incur only per-GB provisioned storage charges. However, scanners must be turned on for at least several hours per week to ensure that they stay up-to-date with software and signatures.

Related Topics

Deployment Recommendations for Scanner