topic Re: ISE Upgrade with GUI method in Network Access Control

ISE Upgrade with GUI method

henry.astorga — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 19:40:18 GMT

Hello ISE Community, I am planning an upgrade of my 3.3 deployment and I was curious if anyone has had success with the GUI upgrade method. In the past I have used the CLI and the backup and restore method and not I am seeing in the 3.5 upgrade guide that the GUI is the recommended method so I am curious to hear of any success (or other) stories and some detail on the time it took to complete. I have a large distributed deployment of 32 total nodes and in the past it has taken an entire weekend starting Friday evening and finishing up Sunday afternoon.

Regards,

Upgrade Fun

Re: ISE Upgrade with GUI method

Arne Bier — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 21:32:42 GMT

I have had great success with GUI upgrades since 3.3. There seems to be a group of people who will never use it because the CLI gives you more control. And that is true - you have 100% control. However, with the GUI it guides you through the process and you can't really mess it up. I will say however, the one time the GUI caused me some trouble was on a remote PSN that was on a slow WAN. I was unable to break out of the GUI when I had already started the code distribution. I wanted to push the upgrade bundle to the DISK:/ repo overnight, and then tell the upgrade wizard to fetch the code there. Now I know to do that in advance and it works great. The GUI also has the nice feature to specify the upgrade bundle + patch. It applies them both - which is nice.

In my view, if an ISE upgrade fails, it's not necessarily because you used the GUI. I do URT and all the checks beforehand - the rest is up to chance.

Re: ISE Upgrade with GUI method

Christopher Bell — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 13:35:00 GMT

Once I got everything set up to use the CLI method and tried it the first time, I can tell you I'll never use the GUI again. That being said our deployment is rather large, about 30 PSN's across multiple sites. Each site has 6 PSN's, 2 for TACACS and 4 for RADIUS. Using the CLI, I can upgrade one node from each site at the same time without disruption (our deployment sits behind load balancers). This makes it go so much faster. Using the GUI, I would be here for 6-8 hours babysitting it. Just my opinion.

Re: ISE Upgrade with GUI method

Arne Bier — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 21:03:11 GMT

@Christopher Bell you reminded me of another convenient feature of the GUI method - you can also upgrade multiple nodes in parallel. E.g. you can select all you secondaries (e.g. secondary TACACS, RADIUS1/RADIUS2/, pxGrid) and upgrade them all at once. Once those are done and active again, you select all the primary nodes in that cohort.

I don't recall much baby sitting, other than observing the progress bar in the GUI while I got on with other things.