Experiences with Cisco's Small Business Pro products

Lately we've been selling a lot of products from Cisco's Small Business Pro line.  I wanted to take some time to write about my experiences with these products, specifically how they (and you!) interact with the corresponding software tools.  This will be a two parter that covers things from both the installation and maintenance standpoints.  There are ups and downs in both phases so I'll lay them out for you and you can come to your own conclusions.

Router

The installation process is where Small Business Pro really shines.  They've done a number of things to not only streamline the configuration process but make it more accessible for people that aren't very familiar with Cisco hardware.  The GUI tool provided for you by Cisco for the install process is the Cisco Configuration Assistant.  Let me first say that while I have developed a love/hate relationship with this tool it makes the initial configuration of hardware a breeze.  I've used CCA to set up two kinds of Unified Communications 500 series devices, the UC 520 and 560, as well as the ESW 500 series SMB Pro switches  and the AP 500 series Wireless Access Points.

For the UC routers of all models, CCA provides you with 2 or 3 straightforward wizards to configure the device.  The main one you are concerned with is the Telephony wizard as it will walk you through configuring both your data and voice networks.  If you accept all the defaults and only had to set up 1 or 2 phones you can take a UC520 from out of the box to production in about an hour with a fully functional IP telephony system.  The UC560 will take slightly longer because it doesn't have the same amount of built in switch ports and is meant more to work with the SMB Pro switches so you will have to configure at least one other piece of hardware; though typically you can get by with very minimal configuration on an ESW switch and would only add an extra 10-15 minutes to the install. However, I have to stress that the setup time I mentioned above does not include upgrading the IOS and Call Manager Express/Unity Express.  It also assumes a very basic setup and no existing customer equipment to be integrated.  Once you have to start adding configuration for analog devices, more complex routing like hunt groups, parking and autoattendants and conform to existing networks your install can take quite a bit longer.

While it does make the install process very quick, Configuration Assistant has also caused me a few headaches.  When upgrading the IOS and CME on new UC500 series routers I've noticed that the upgrade wizard within CCA can be touchy. If the upgrades fails while using the wizard, you are often left with a halfway upgraded router that CCA doesn't recognize and can no longer configure.  Additionally, I have found the CCA wizard for resetting to factory defaults to be unreliable in this situation.  Should this happen to you I would recommend using the command line to reset both the router and CUE to defaults and start the upgrade anew.  The other major issue I ran into was when I changed the default IP scheme for the voice vlan.  After the wizard was finished committing my changes I found that it had not updated a couple of important places within the system.  The first was the IP address for the TFTP server.  With this address not being properly set, phones were unable to download their firmware properly.  The other place it did not update was the IP address within the configuration for conferencing.

Switches and APs

When it comes to setting up the SMB Pro switches and APs  you'll be moving away from the CCA and be using a web based configuration tool.  The GUI here is basically a glorified Linksys configuration page.  You do have access to a lot more functionality on the switches in terms of troubleshooting and monitoring but here again the initial configuration is very simple.  On the switches all you need to do is set an IP address and possibly create some vlans.   You can do the majority of your switchport setup with smartport macros that are assigned by selecting the macro and clicking the port and then assign the proper vlans on a separate page with a drop down box.  If you've configured a Catalyst Express switch before you'll be right at home as the ESW handles much the same way, with the notable exception that the ESW does not have the html based command line interface available on the Cat Express series.  However, the feature set within the GUI is much more robust to help account for this.  You are now able to monitor things from within the web GUI that you weren't able to in the Cat Express GUI.  One good example of this is CDP, it took a little searching to find but the switch maintains a table of CDP information for you that wasn't available previously.  There are a number of other features as well but that is beyond the scope of this blog.

With the AP 500s, the configuration is also done through a web based configuration tool that again more closely resembles a Linksys product than the configuration page for a Cisco Aironet device.  Again its all very simple with text fields and drop downs being used for most of the configuration.  The most noteworthy thing here is a new feature called Clustering.  You can configure a single AP and then create a cluster and join the AP to it.  Then with subsequent APs, you can simply give them an IP and then join them to the cluster.  Once in the cluster they will then pull down all of the configuration from another device in the cluster.  In this way, each SMB Pro AP acts in the way that a wireless controller used to and greatly increases wireless network scalability.

The biggest issues I've run into with the ESW switches and AP 500 WAPs is one of credentials/security.  For instance, with the ESW switches there is an issue with using an "&" in passwords.  It will allow you to use this symbol when setting the password but when you next try to log in, your password will not be accepted.  I tried it on Firefox, IE and Chrome and was unable to get logged in using any password that had an "&" in it.

On the AP side of things you are unable to change the username from the default cisco and the password must be NO MORE than 8 characters.  I'm not sure why they were designed in this way but its a step backward in terms of security.

Conclusion:

On the whole I feel that Cisco has made the Small Business Pro line of products extremely easy to roll out for the initial install when paired with Configuration Assistant.  The wizard based setup of your voice and data vlans is simple and intuitive and best of all its quick.  With its web based GUI for APs and switches Cisco definately continues the linksys tradition of easy centralized management while also adding in a fairly robust set of features for admins that need greater control.  The flaws I've run into in this process so far are relatively small and could be fixed by software updates down the line without requiring a major change in the softwares focus and the market at which its aimed.

However, when using the Configuration Assistant to maintain and update the network, we'll find that the picture changes and CCA loses some of its luster.