If I may add a little more to this thread:
1) I have received 6 Series 5 Appliances with 3 HBA cards, can someone suggest me how to install these cards and on to which component they need to be installed. (SA Head Unit, Decoder, Concentrator, Event Stream analysis, Archiver or Log collector)
A: The HBAs are for connecting to a SAN storage of some sort. As such you should place these cards in the Decoder, Concentrator and Archiver as these are the three that require external storage. See the guides as mentioned by Eric for installation of these cards.
2) What is the order of installation of these devices.
A: You should set them all up so you can SSH into each before attempting to connect them to the UI server. It is very important that you do not answer the question when logging in to the appliances about the IP address of the SA head until you have all the appliance setups completed (IP address, Hostname, HBA installation, etc.). This will save you time and problems later. Once that is done follow the deployment guide in the documentation as mentioned by Eric.
3) Do these devices come with pre-installed OS, of after booting I need to configure the roles onto these devices.
A: Currently Netwitness comes preconfigured for the role they are used for on CentOS 6. All you have to do is set them up like you would any other CentOS server. Two scripts run on first start up. One asks you for the network and host name configuration items. The second asks about the SA UI server's IP address. Remember do not answer the one about the SA UI server's IP address until you are ready to add it to the UI. You can Ctrl-C when you see the question. It will continue to ask for it every time you login until you set it so you won't have to worry about running it manually.
4) How to connect these devices to storage.
A: As you have HBAs you will need to consult your SAN/VNX admin for supplying storage to your appliances. RSA Netwitness Support does not have instructions for that. However once the storage is being presented to the appliances you will need to run the NwArrayConfig.py script. It can be found in /opt/rsa/saTools on all the appliances. Once this is ran it will configure the provided storage for the appliance it is on. Make sure you can see all the storage before running the script. You can try multipath -ll to see all the LUNs being presented.
5) Any other thing which needs to be kept in mind during the installation.
A: There are a lot of things that can go wrong as mentioned by the previous two posts on initial setup. You currently have no working knowledge as to how the appliances work together or to setup the storage via the HBAs. It is strongly suggested by RSA Support that you request Professional Services assistance with the initial setup to give you a good foundation going forward with your RSA Netwitness Infrastructure. If you need to add appliances later it would be to your advantage to have this knowledge transferred to you now. Normally a Professional Services engagement sets up the environment for you based on your specifications and then provides knowledge transfer of how to make changes, maintain the appliances and how to effectively use the UI for creating reports & alerts along with doing rudimentary investigations. Trust me when I say if you want to be able to impress your management and company with the capabilities of your RSA Netwitness infrastructure, you want Professional Services assistance.
