The Cisco Cluster Management Suite (CMS)

The Cisco Cluster Management Suite (CMS) represents the smallest of the management
options supplied by Cisco. Larger offerings fall into the CiscoWorks range of SNMP-based
management programs.
CMS supports the management of up to 16 distributed switches. Access is via a standard
browser interface, providing a web-based interface for managing the IOS commands on a Cisco
switch. CMS is used as an alternative to connecting to the console or establishing a Telnet session
to a switch and using the standard command-line interface (CLI).
The use of a standard browser plus the enhancements made possible by customization of the
interface mean that this is a simple-to-use application. CMS provides a topology map to enable
you to identify the switch that you wish to configure simply by looking at the diagram. Builtin
applets include report creation and alarm monitoring. CMS supports all of the advanced features
found on the CLI, including MLS forwarding options and QoS for voice and video.