Adding SonicWall Appliances Manually to GMS

To manually add a SonicWall appliance using the SonicWall GMS UI, follow the below steps.

1. In the top right of the Home page, select the type of appliance that you want to add, Firewall or SSL-VPN, from the dropdown (if managing multiple device types).
2. Expand the GMS Device Manager tree (top left of Home page) and select the group to which you will add the SonicWall appliance. Then, right-click the group and select Add Unit from the pop-up menu. If you do not wish to specify a group, right-click an open area in the left pane of the SonicWall GMS UI and select Add Unit. The Add Unit dialog box appears.
3. Expand the Advanced Details to display all management options.
4. Enter a descriptive name for the SonicWall appliance in the Unit Name field.
   Note: Do not enter the single quote character (‘) in the Unit Name field.
5. Enter the administrator login name for the SonicWall appliance in the Login Name field.
6. Enter the password used to access the SonicWall appliance in the Password field.
7. Enter the serial number of the SonicWall appliance in the Serial Number field.
8. Select from the following management modes:
   1. If the SonicWall appliance will be managed through an existing VPN tunnel or over a private network, select Using Existing Tunnel or LAN.
   2. If the SonicWall appliance will be managed through a dedicated management VPN tunnel, select Using Management VPN Tunnel.
   3. If the SonicWall appliance will be managed over HTTPS, select Using HTTPS/SSL (when using HTTPS method you must use the default firewall admin.
9. Enter the port used to administer the SonicWall appliance in the HTTPS Port field (such as HTTPS: 443).
10. When using the Management Tunnel option, enter a 16-character encryption key in the SA Encryption Key field. The key must be exactly 16 characters long and composed of hexadecimal characters. Valid hexadecimal characters are “0” to “9”, and “a” to “f ” (i.e., 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, a, b, c, d, e, f). For example, a valid key would be “1234567890abcdef.”
    Note:  This key must match the encryption key of the SonicWall appliance. You can set the key on the appliance by logging directly into it.
11. Additionally when using the Managment Tunnel option, enter a 32-character authentication key in the SA Authentication Key field. The key must be exactly 32 characters long and composed of hexadecimal characters. For example, a valid key would be “1234567890abcdef1234567890abcdef.”
    Note: This key must match the authentication key of the SonicWall appliance.
12. Select the IP address of the SonicWall GMS agent server that will manage the SonicWall appliance from the Agent IP Address list box:
    1. If SonicWall GMS is configured in a multi-tier distributed environment, you must select the SonicWall GMS Agent whose IP address matches the IP address that you specified when configuring the SonicWall appliance for SonicWall GMS management.
    2. If SonicWall GMS is in a single-server environment, the IP address of the SonicWall GMS agent server already appears in the field.
13. If SonicWall GMS is configured in a multi-tier distributed environment, enter the IP address of the backup SonicWall GMS server in the Standby Agent IP field. The backup server will automatically manage the SonicWall appliance in the event of a primary server failure. Any Agent can be configured as the backup.
    Note: If SonicWall GMS is deployed in a single server environment, leave this field blank.
14. Click Properties. The Unit Properties dialog box appears
15. This dialog box displays the category fields to which the SonicWall appliance belongs. To change any of the values, select a new value from the drop-down list. When you are finished, click OK. You are returned to the Add Unit dialog box.
16. Click OK. The new SonicWall appliance appears in the SonicWall GMS UI. It will have a yellow icon that indicates it has not yet been successfully acquired.

The SonicWall GMS will then attempt to create a management VPN tunnel, set up an HTTPS connection, or use the existing site-to-site VPN tunnel to access the appliance. GMS then reads the appliance configuration and acquires the SonicWall appliance for management. This will take a few minutes.

After the SonicWall appliance is successfully acquired, its icon turns green, its configuration settings are displayed at the unit level, and its settings are saved to the database.

Note: In a multi-tier distributed environment, both the primary and secondary SonicWall GMS Agents must be configured to use the same management method.