Preparing the SNS 3615 for ISE 3.4 upgrade

renzanjo-caparas — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 03:28:42 GMT

Hi!

While i am aware that SNS 3615 can still support ISE 3.4, I am kind of anxious whether the appliance's resources can.

Say for example the storage, memory. I cannot find any public document stating the hardware specs required for the upgrade. Or I was just overwhelmed.

Can somebody kindly advise on this?

Re: Preparing the SNS 3615 for ISE 3.4 upgrade

Arne Bier — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 04:11:31 GMT

What is the expected workload for this node?

Will it be an all-in-one node, or will it have a dedicated persona (e.g. Admin, Monitoring, PSN)?

For a dedicated PSN, I have no doubt it can handle most small to medium deployments - e.g. up to 20,000 concurrent endpoints. And again, it depends on the workload - what is the expected requests per second? Is there a lot of complex 802.1X and AD lookups etc.?

In most wired NAC scenarios, the RADIUS auths are fairly low (no re-auth once connected) - and if Accounting is set to 2880 minutes (every 48 hours) as Cisco suggests, then those PSNs will be mostly idle, assuming that accounting requests are spread with a nice random distribution across the 48 hour window.

The biggest weakness of the SNS-3615 is that it has only one spinning hard disk - which is super slow compared to modern SSD/NVMe storage. That means the 3615 is not an ideal choice for monitoring node. But again, it can do the job ... just don't expect SSD-type speeds from it. And the HDD is limited to 600GB. Which might be more than adequate for some small use cases.

topic Preparing the SNS 3615 for ISE 3.4 upgrade in Network Access Control

Preparing the SNS 3615 for ISE 3.4 upgrade

Re: Preparing the SNS 3615 for ISE 3.4 upgrade