Learn about the QGS Appliance
These are the steps to create your own QGS appliance from the QGS User Interface.
- Create a New Appliance. Give the appliance a name and enter a location, if desired.
- Generate a Personalization Code. Similar to the virtual scanner, you need to enter this Personalization Code in the QGS virtual appliance local user interface to fully configure the appliance.
- Select Download Image and chose the appropriate file format for your environment
- Download/copy the virtual appliance image to your virtualization server.
- Configure the Virtual Machine properties following the specified resources.
- A minimum disk size of 250GB is required.
- Only a single secondary virtual hard drive is recognized as available capacity; extending the second QGS volume via multiple virtual hard drives is not supported.
Enabling Patch Mode so that QGS can cache patches requires a second virtual hard drive to be added to the virtual appliance before Patch Mode can be enabled.
The third hard disk is not supported and would not be recognized on the CAMS/QGS appliance to use the patch mode. We recommend using only one extra hard disk of 150GB or more to use the patch mode.
- Start the image.
Console access to the running image is required to configure the appliance.
- Use the console-based user interface to configure the virtual appliance for networking, DNS, time server, and optional upstream proxy configuration (see instructions below).
- Validate that the appliance can successfully communicate with the Qualys Platform.
- Register the Appliance with the Qualys Platform.
The QGS Appliance supports a Diagnostic mode to help accelerate Qualys Customer Support troubleshooting and problem resolution, primarily for initial network setup and registration issues. Refer to the section below on Diagnostics Mode.
Qualys Gateway Service Module User Interface
The Activity Summary widgets provide aggregate activity information for all QGS appliances in the subscription. Active Agents and Total Agents count the number unique agent IPs connecting through all appliances. Bandwidth Savings is calculated in cache mode.
- Status: This column shows the current status of your appliance. Appliances with common CA certificate enabled is shown as an icon (Highlighted) on the appliance list page.
- Unique IPs: This column shows the count of unique IPs which have communicated through the QGS appliance proxy port during the last 60 minutes.
- Active Agents: This column shows the number of active agents which have communicated via the QGS appliance cache port during the last 60 minutes, with QGS and Cloud Agent configured to use Cache mode.
In Proxy mode, you’ll see only unique IPs count on QGSUI, while in Cache mode you’ll see count of active agent and unique IPs on QGSUI.
To create a new appliance, click New Appliance.
Create a New Appliance
While creating a new appliance/personalization code, you can chose the appliance certificate type from the "Assign certificate" section.
A Qualys Signed certificate is a common certificate. It can help you to deploy a single certificate across all the cloud agents meant for the particular appliance.
If you want to use a common certificate while registering the appliance, then click Use Common Certificate checkbox.
We recommend to use the Common CA certificate for all the appliances. An Appliance Signed certificate is a certificate specific to that appliance.
A Customer Signed certificate is signed by the customer from the Certificates tab of the QGS UI. Read more about creating Customer Signed certificates at Upload Certificates.
When you select the customer-signed certificate, you can see the below window to assign the custom certificate while generating the personalization code.
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