The Ribbon SBC Software Edition (SWe) is the industry’s first software-based Session Border Controller (SBC) architected to deliver unlimited scalability with the same advanced features and functionality of the SBC Core. The SBC SWe is a virtual SBC appliance that can be hosted on Intel Servers running the VMware ESXi and KVM platform. The following figure shows the solution architecture of SBC SWe hosted on an Intel server running VMware ESXi.

SBC SWe hosted on Intel Server running VMware ESXi

The complete SBC SWe solution consists of the following components:

Customer Provided:

  • Hardware—Memory, CPU, network cards, and disk drives.
  • Hypervisor—A thin layer of software that runs on top of the hardware. The hypervisor gives each Virtual Machine (VM) a dedicated view of the hardware.
  • Virtual Machine (VM)—VMware ESXi operating system hosted on Hypervisor. The VM appears to the user as a separate physical computer. The VM shares physical resources with other virtual machines.

Ribbon SBC SWe Software:

The SBC SWe appears to users as an independent SBC with its own network identity, user authorization and authentication capabilities, as well as configuration and data.

The SBC SWe application is deployable in the following environments as either a stand-alone SBC (dedicated stand-alone appliance) or Embedded SBC (as part of an existing hardware platform):

  • In a private cloud: The SBC SWe application resides on a private virtualized cloud, whereby new instances can be instantiated as more capacity is needed.
  • In a public cloud: The SBC SWe image is available to an enterprise wanting to deploy SBC SWe as part of building a virtual public cloud.
  • On a dedicated server: The SBC SWe application exists on COTS hardware rather than a proprietary platform.

The SBC SWe targets small to large session count deployments (25 to unlimited). These capacities make this product particularly well suited for small to large enterprises and service providers. Refer to For VMware for additional details.

Note

The SBC SWe does not currently support "elastic cloud computing" environments. 

For a description of the basic SBC configuration objects, refer to SBC Core Application Architecture.