Firepower 2100

[DuaneUI]

Greetings All - I have a bit of a dilemma right now. We just purchased a pair of Firepower 2120 Firewalls. These devices turned out to be rocket science. All documentation just jumps into configuration using FMC. My first question was: What is this FMC? I started doing research and it seems to be a different piece of software that either runs on a VM or on a separate appliance. So that leads me to these two questions:

• How do I get FMC and is it free?
• Is this required to configure the Firepower properly? I have been using FDM that is loaded on the device itself but I can't find any way of enabling OSPF or any other routing protocols on FDM or cli.

I would really hate to learn that Cisco is selling this appliance with a dependency on another appliance for configuration. Gone are the days when i just buy my Cisco ASAs and configure them for use. My worse mistake was assuming these were just later versions of the ASA series firewalls.

Please Help!

[Marvin Rhoads]

With all Firepower 2100 appliances running Firepower Threat Defense image you have the option of local management using Firepower Device Manager (FDM) or remote management using Firepower Management Center (FMC).

Cisco has been adding to the feature set in FDM but it still lags FMC. Here's a list of what was added in the current release 6.3:

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/security/firepower/630/relnotes/firepower-release-notes-630/new_features.html#concept_D3A005FB2B0E45BBBDF5392C4D1DD138

You can configure OSPF and BGP via the smart cli in FDM. 

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/security/firepower/630/fdm/fptd-fdm-config-guide-630/fptd-fdm-advanced.html?bookSearch=true

FMC is indeed a separate server and runs as a VM or hardware appliance. For managing just a pair of Firepower appliances the cost is under US$1000.