Cisco Network Assistant

You must be familiar with Cisco Network Assistant (CNA). It is free tool that helps you to configure the Cisco Equipment. This tool is very easy to operate and managed as compared with Cisco Configmaker.

In Small and Medium Enterprises (SMBs) in the production of the product line, it has provided a free tool for Cisco Network Assistant (CNA) to help you configure the Cisco Equipment. You must be thinking that the objective of this tool is for Small and Medium Business segment and hence does not necessarily apply to you, but keep in mind that in Cisco’s terminology “Small & Medium Business” segment is fairly large business.

As this tool is free, so you can download this tool from Cisco’s website. From the small and medium sized router to 6500 series Catalyst switches, PIX firewalls, IP phones and wireless access points, etc are supported by CNA. Accordingly to Cisco, CNA is bests suited for the setup in which number of users are up to 250 only.
I don’t know how many users will be in your setup, however the number of users is to determine what you need to use in router configuration tool.( may be you have more than 250 users, so Cisco may think that you should have more network management in its budget, so it wants to sell you a management tool)
But I had managed the network in which there were more than 1000 users and were located in 50 different cities and by using CNA ( Cisco Network Assistant ) tool I was able to manage them well.
In fact this tool also supports many more high-end features.

In some places, CNA can replace Cisco’s Configmaker. Cisco has officially abandoned the configmaker and no longer supports it and neither have any plans to upgrade.

For common Cisco routers, especially the 2600 series and 3600 series, the use of configmaker is still very good configurator for their basic functions. The reason of not using configmaker is because this tool can only produce static configuration ( which is based on what u tell it needs to configure it in order to configure anything) and then downloaded to the static configuration of these routers.
Configmaker’ s biggest flaw is that it does not support any new Cisco equipment and this is why over time using this tool, fewer and fewer reasons.

Cisco Network Assistant (CNA) offers many features & wizards. Also provides more real-time information if compared with configmaker.