Cisco Cisco Customer Voice Portal 8.0(1) Design Guide

There are two ways to use the CSA feature of Unified CVP:

If you want the protection of CSA but do not intend to customize its protection policies, install the 
unmanaged Cisco Security Agent provided by Cisco. 

If you want to modify the behavior of CSA, buy and install the Cisco Security Agent Management 
Console for CSA and import and modify the policies supplied with the unmanaged agent.

The Cisco Security Agent is not automatically installed by the Unified CVP installer. After installing 
Unified CVP, do one of the following:

Obtain the unmanaged version of CSA for Unified CVP and install it on the server. The unmanaged 
version will include the supplied Cisco security policies which cannot be modified.

Or, obtain the Cisco Security Management Console and install it. Then obtain the .export file that 
contains the Cisco security policy, modify the policy as desired, and deploy CSA using your 
modified policy.

For detailed information about Cisco Security Agent, its unmanaged and managed versions, and about 
obtaining and installing the software, refer to Cisco Security Agent Installation/Deployment Guide for 
Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal, Release 8.0(1). The document is available under Install and 
Upgrade Guides at 

You can also download the software from the Cisco website, refer to:

Cisco does not support a user-modified version of the CSA security policy. Also, note that CSA for 
Unified CVP is not supported on the device running Unified CVP Call Studio, nor on any non-CVP 
devices. There are specific versions of CSA for other Cisco devices

The Content Services Switch (CSS) is a load-balancing device designed to provide robust, highly 
available and scalable network services for data centers. The CSS can be logically placed between one 
or more VoiceXML Gateways and one or more Unified CVP VXML Servers, Media Servers, and 
ASR/TTS Servers. Various mechanisms allow the CSS to implement transparent load balancing and 
failover across these servers. One of these mechanism is the stateful redundancy mechanism, which is 
called Adaptive Session Redundancy in CSS terms. Adaptive Session Redundancy (ASR) provides 
session-level redundancy for applications where active flows (including TCP and UDP) must continue 
without interruption, even if the master CSS fails-over to the backup CSS.

CSS is an optional device, but it is highly recommended. Without it, the IVR Service implements a poor 
man's failover mechanism, but it is not load-balanced and various retries and delays are part of the 
algorithm, all of which can be avoided if CSS is used.

The CSS is normally deployed as a Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) pair. VRRP provides 
box-to-box redundancy for CSS pairs. For session-level redundancy (stateful failover), CSS pairs could 
use the Adaptive Session Redundancy option to minimize VXML Server license port usage during a CSS 
failover. VRRP is useful in all deployment models except for Call Director call flows, which do not 
require use of Unified CVP VXML Servers, Media Servers, or ASR/TTS servers. If SSL is used in the 
solution, you will need an SSL module for the CSS 11503 or 11506 chassis.