Clustering

With Tenable Nessus Manager clustering, you can deploy and manage large numbers of agents from a single Tenable Nessus Manager instance. For Tenable Security Center users with over 10,000 agents and up to 200,000 agents, you can manage your agent scans from a single Tenable Nessus Manager cluster, rather than needing to link multiple instances of Tenable Nessus Manager to Tenable Security Center.

A Tenable Nessus Manager instance with clustering enabled acts as a parent node to child nodes, each of which manage a smaller number of agents. Once a Tenable Nessus Manager instance becomes a parent node, it no longer manages agents directly. Instead, it acts as a single point of access where you can manage scan policies and schedules for all the agents across the child nodes. With clustering, you can scale your deployment size more easily than if you had to manage several different Tenable Nessus Manager instances separately.

Example scenario: Deploying 100,000 agents

You are a Tenable Security Center user who wants to deploy 100,000 agents, managed by Tenable Nessus Manager.

Without clustering, you deploy 10 Tenable Nessus Manager instances, each supporting 10,000 agents. You must manually manage each Tenable Nessus Manager instance separately, such as setting agent scan policies and schedules, and updating your software versions. You must separately link each Tenable Nessus Manager instance to Tenable Security Center.

With clustering, you use one Tenable Nessus Manager instance to manage 100,000 agents. You enable clustering on Tenable Nessus Manager, which turns it into a parent node, a management point for child nodes. You link 10 child nodes, each of which manages around 10,000 agents. You can either link new agents or migrate existing agents to the cluster. The child nodes receive agent scan policy, schedule, and plugin and software updates from the parent node. You link only the Tenable Nessus Manager parent node to Tenable Security Center.

Note: All Tenable Nessus nodes in a cluster must be on the same version (for example, using the clustering example above, the Tenable Nessus Manager parent node and 10 children nodes need be on the same Tenable Nessus version). Otherwise, the cluster deployment is unsupported.

Definitions

Parent node — The Tenable Nessus Manager instance with clustering enabled, which child nodes link to.

Child node — A Tenable Nessus instance that acts as a node that Tenable Nessus Agents connect to.

Tenable Nessus Manager cluster — A parent node, its child nodes, and associated agents.

For more information, see the following topics: