What is a Site?

A site is the object in Versa Concerto and Titan Portal that represents a physical location – a branch office, data center, or customer premises – defined by an address, a region, and its associated Director and Controller nodes, with the appliances, hub or hub-controller role, and device template attached to it.

Key takeaways

• A site is a Concerto/Titan object representing one physical location.
• Each site holds an address, region, and a topology role together.
• Sites attach appliances, hubs, hub controllers, and a device template.
• Topology roles include hub, hub controller, spoke, or full mesh.
• Analytics dashboards and reports commonly refer to appliances as sites.

On this page: Why it matters · How it works · Types · Sites & Versa · FAQ

Why are sites important?

A site is the organizing unit that lets a provider or enterprise manage a network location by location instead of device by device. Every appliance, WAN link, security policy, and monitoring dashboard in Versa’s SD-WAN and SASE products is scoped to a site, so onboarding a branch, data center, or customer premises means creating one site object rather than wiring up configuration by hand.

That scoping also drives visibility. Titan Portal’s Configure, Monitor, and Troubleshoot dashboards render every site as a honeycomb showing its name, location, and devices, and the top menu bar exposes the Director region hierarchy those sites sit under. Operators can switch to a map view or filter the honeycomb to the sites that matter. Getting the site model right – one clean object per location, correctly placed in its region – is what makes a network with thousands of branches legible.

What is a site?

A site represents exactly one physical location. Creating one means supplying a site name, a street address (city, state, zip, country), and optionally latitude and longitude coordinates, then assigning it a region – the grouping Versa Director uses for hierarchy and access control – and a device group or template that supplies its baseline configuration. The site also carries a topology role that determines how it participates in the wider network, and it holds the serial number and status of the appliance or appliances deployed to it.

Deploying a site’s configuration informs the Controller node it exists; activating the appliance then authenticates it, pulls down its configuration, and lets traffic flow. HA sites pair two identical appliances behind one site object, shown as two device icons.

Types of sites

A site’s topology role sets how it reaches the rest of the network. Full mesh is the default: any-to-any communication with every other full-mesh site, suited to deployments with no need for centralized routing. A hub site anchors a hub-and-spoke topology, letting spoke sites route through it and enabling centralized internet breakout and traffic-steering policy. A hub controller site takes on a dual hub-and-controller role, needed when branches sit on a private MPLS network with no direct path to the Versa-hosted Controller node. A spoke site connects to at least one hub and requires that hub to already exist.

Spoke groups add further control over how spokes reach each other: spoke-to-hub-only blocks direct spoke communication, spoke-to-spoke-via-hub routes two spokes through the hub, and spoke-to-spoke-direct opens a tunnel that bypasses it. The same model applies whether the appliance is a physical CSG, a containerized cCSG, or a virtual vCSG.

Sites & Versa

Titan Portal builds site creation around the honeycomb dashboard: dragging a device license onto it opens the New Site window, where name, address, region, device group, topology, and HA mode are set before the site is saved and deployed. Changes like adding a WAN interface or switching topology type require undeploying and redeploying; changing the appliance model requires deactivating and recreating the site.

For deployments that combine Secure SD-WAN with Versa-hosted SSE, each site’s VOS branch reaches the SSE cloud over a site-to-site IPsec tunnel – one tunnel per WAN link is typical, with BGP and BFD recommended once a site has more than one path to the cloud gateway. Best practice is to identify site-to-site peers with fully qualified domain names rather than static IP addresses, since branch WAN addresses can change.

Frequently asked questions

What information defines a site?

A site’s core fields are its name, physical address (and optionally latitude/longitude), region, device group or template, and topology role. These are set when the site is created and drive the configuration pushed to its appliance or appliances, including its Wi-Fi, LAN, WAN, security, and steering settings.

Can one site host more than one appliance?

Yes, for high availability. An HA site pairs two identical appliances of the same license type under one site object, each deployed and activated separately; the honeycomb shows two device icons, and either device’s options card can remove the site.

What is the difference between a hub site and a hub controller site?

A hub site lets spoke sites route through it in a hub-and-spoke topology. A hub controller site adds the Controller role to that same device, needed when spokes are on a private network without direct internet access to the hosted Controller node.

Can a site’s topology be changed after it is created?

Some topology changes require undeploying and redeploying the site’s configuration – for example, switching between full mesh and spoke, or from spoke to a hub role. Others, like changing the appliance model for that location, require deactivating and fully recreating the site.

Why do Analytics reports sometimes say “appliance” and sometimes “site”?

The two terms overlap in practice: a physical or virtual appliance deployed as a branch, hub, gateway, or Controller node is what occupies a site, so Analytics dashboards and reports commonly use “site” and “appliance” interchangeably when describing one location.

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