Cisco VPN Client Silent Installation for SCCM 2007 & 2012 Distribution

Cisco’s VPN Client installer extracts to an MSI, which makes it a good candidate for silent, unattended deployment through SCCM — whether you’re pushing it as a classic SCCM 2007 package/program or a ConfigMgr 2012+ application.

The Install Command

msiexec /i "vpnclient_setup.msi" /qn /norestart

/qn runs the install completely silently with no UI, and /norestart stops the installer from rebooting the machine on its own so you can control that as part of your deployment (a separate task sequence step, or a scheduled maintenance window).

Packaging Notes

• Package the entire extracted folder, not just the MSI on its own — the Cisco installer expects its supporting cab/driver files to be sitting alongside it, and a bare MSI copy will usually fail partway through.
• Cisco VPN Client includes a virtual network adapter driver, so expect the install to briefly interrupt networking and, on some builds, require a reboot before the VPN adapter is fully usable — test this on a representative machine before wide deployment.
• As an SCCM 2012+ Application, set the detection method against the installed MSI product code (or the Cisco Systems VPN Client registry uninstall key) rather than just file presence, so re-evaluation behaves correctly.

Cisco’s legacy VPN Client is long past end-of-life and doesn’t officially support modern Windows releases — if you’re deploying VPN connectivity to current Windows 10/11 machines, it’s worth checking whether Cisco AnyConnect (or your organisation’s current VPN client) is the better fit before standardising on this older package.

Resources

• Cisco
• MSI
• SCCM