Cisco Cisco Configuration Engine 1.4 Ficha De Dados
Data Sheet
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Cisco Configuration Engine 3.0
The Cisco® Configuration Engine provides a unified, secure solution for automating the deployment of Cisco
customer premises equipment (CPE). This scalable product distributes device and service configuration files and
software images to one device or a group of devices, thereby reducing operating costs and deployment time to
enable new services and customers.
The Cisco Configuration Engine is a highly scalable software application running on a Solaris or Linux server; with
this application you can manage your CPE devices, including Cisco routers, Cisco switches, and Cisco PIX®
devices. Cisco Configuration Engine is accessible through a web-based GUI or web services such as XML and
Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP).
Service provider and large enterprise customers face similar challenges of deploying and managing large volumes of
network devices. This complexity is further increased when they introduce managed services such as unified
communications, security, and VPNs. Traditionally, customers deploy management products from hardware
vendors, which often do not meet operational challenges for managing the service-oriented network.
The Cisco Configuration Engine architecture addresses your operational concerns such as scalability, performance,
programmatic interfaces, and the flexibility to customize CPE deployments to meet your business and operation
requirements. Adapting to standards-based web and networking technologies, the Cisco Configuration Engine
supports a highly scalable, available, distributed, and fault-tolerant architecture, allowing you to customize core
components to meet your requirements. Figure 1 shows a high-level overview of a fault-tolerant, distributed Cisco
Configuration Engine implementation.
Cisco IOS® Software devices connect to the Cisco Configuration Engine through persistent and secure TCP
connections over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), facilitating the distribution of device and service configuration to
thousands of devices in minutes. The Cisco Configuration Engine is shipped with all the necessary software
components and an embedded data repository to quickly begin managing devices. As shown in Figure 1, when
managing large volumes of Cisco devices you can adapt a distributed, highly available, fault-tolerant architecture
with no single point of failure.
In this scenario, all Cisco Configuration Engines can share a common external data repository, which you can
duplicate for redundancy. Because Cisco IOS Software devices connect to the Cisco Configuration Engine through
persistent TCP connections, a Cisco Configuration Engine failure will lead to a loss of connectivity. You can
optionally deploy a Cisco Content Switching Module to load balance Cisco IOS Software device connections and
then configure the switch to move the connections to another Cisco Configuration Engine appliance if failure occurs.