Customers that buy SonicWall’s Aventail SSL VPN gear can now manage it through the same platform they use to manage other SonicWall products.

The company has integrated the Aventail SSL VPN equipment it acquired last year into its Global Management System, eliminating the need to manage the Aventail gear separately.

A new release of software for the Aventail VPN devices tries to make SSL more suitable as a direct replacement for IPSec VPNs by adding features common to IPSec gear. For instance, the Aventail 9.0 software supports tunnel failover when one of the SSL gateways fails. (For more information about SSL VPNs see our SSL VPN Buyer’s Guide).

Previously, if an Aventail gateway failed it could fail to another paired machine. With the upgrade, the client connecting to the failed machine fails over to another device, perhaps at a different location. This is a common IPSec feature.

Another feature lets users connect to certain local network assets, such as printers, while attached to the SSL VPN. Previously, all traffic from a given machine could connect to nothing locally at the same time it was connected to the VPN.