Cisco CCP Installation and Basic Configuration

Cisco Configuration Professional (Cisco CP) is a GUI based device management tool for Cisco access routers. This tool simplifies routing, firewall, IPS, VPN, unified communications, WAN and LAN configuration through GUI based easy-to-use wizards. It has been used to replace obsolete SDM (Security Device Manager) product.

Cisco Configuration Professional offers smart wizards and advanced configuration support for LAN and WAN interfaces, Network Address Translation (NAT), stateful and application firewall policy, IPS, IPSec and SSL VPN, QoS, and Cisco Network Admission Control policy features. The firewall wizard allows a single-step deployment of high, medium, or low firewall policy settings. IT managers can easily organize and manage multiple routers at a single site.

Cisco Configuration Professional Offers:

One-click router lockdown
Innovative voice and security auditing capabilities to check and recommend changes to router configurations
Monitoring of router status
Troubleshooting of WAN and VPN connectivity issues
Cisco Configuration Professional Express is a GUI-based embedded device management tool for Cisco Integrated Services Routers (ISRs). It is available on the flash of the router and used for bootstrapping and basic configurations.

Cisco Configuration Professional Express Offers:

Basic configuration of router WAN and LAN interfaces
Hostname, Dynamic Name Server (DNS), and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) configurations
User Management for the router
Configuration of plug-n-play server
Dashboard, basic troubleshooting, and command line interface (CLI) tool

1. Download and Installation

Cisco Configuration Professional is offered in two versions - Cisco Configuration Professional and Cisco Configuration Professional Express. In this post, Cisco CP 2.8 will be used as an example. Installation procedure is quite straightforward.

CCP PC System Requirements

System Component	Requirement
Processor	2 GHz processor or faster
Random Access Memory	1 GB DRAM minimum; 2 GB recommended
Hard disk available memory	400 MB
Operating System	Any of the following: Microsoft Windows 7-32 and 64 bit Microsoft Windows 8 Microsoft Windows Vista Business Edition Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Edition Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 3-32 bit Mac OSX 10.5.6 running Windows XP using VMWare 2.0
Browser	Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher
Screen Resolution	1024 X 768
Java Runtime Environment	JRE Versions 1.6.0_11 up to Version 1.7.0_17
Adobe Flash Player	Version 10.0 or later, with Debug set to “No” (For IE Browswer)

(Note: Please make sure all minimum settings are checked.)

2. Launch CCP Application

Double click the icon to launch application.

Note: If you are getting an error like this : "Access to C:\Program Files (x86)\Cisco Systems\CiscoCP\bin\_uiDefaultLoadComplete was denied." with an opened blank IE page, you will need to run your CCP as administrator.

3. Add Device

Cisco Configuration Professional supports Secure Shell (SSH)and Secure HTTP (HTTPS) to communicate with the Cisco devices. You can even connect Cisco devices using HTTP instead of HTTPS, if you have slow machines. Remember to use HTTP only in a demo or training session. HTTP traffic is not enmcrypted and someone in your network may capture your network credentials. Use HTTPS only in a real production environment.

There are some configuration has to be done first. Else you will get connection errors.

We have to enable HTTP/HTTPS server on Cisco router and configure a user database for login.

SW1#configure terminal
SW1(config)#username test1 privilege 15 secret test1
SW1(config)#ip http server
SW1(config)#ip http secure-server
SW1(config)#ip http authentication local
SW1(config)#exit
SW1#

3.1 Add a switch
Added a WS-C2960S-24TS-S switch with IOS version 12.2 to try and got following information: