ISE 2.1 to 2.6 - Best Option to Move forward.. ?

[mulatif]

Hi,

I have a customer planning to move from ISE 2.1 (Older ISE appliance) to ISE 2.6 (New 36xx appliances).

They have an Endpoint DB, which they do "not" want to loose. I understand that in this case they have

Option 1: --> DB backup from 2.1 and restore to new ISE 2.6

Option 2: --> Just export the Endpoint DB from old implementation and import into 2.6.

Is there a benefit of one over the other ? I understand that with Option "2", they would loose other stuff like Auth\Authz rules etc. but at the same time this might give them a relatively clean start ? (Especially if the number of Auth\Authz rules is not high).

Any thoughts\opinions are much appreciated.

Thanks,

Naman

[Damien Miller · Accepted solution]

If you plan on recreating much of that you are leaving behind, a restore would be an easy time saving process.  

One thing I have noticed about the export/import of endpoints from context visibility is that it can be very slow.  You won't be able to take a 2.1 endpoint export and directly import in to 2.6, you will have to manipulate the data in to the import template.  You will also have to recreate any customer identity groups and profiles if that was built previously.  

I would lean to the side of restoring a backup, then cleaning up what I don't want just because of that endpoint requirement.  

If you restore and then later decide you don't want the restored data, you can reset the application configuration from the CLI, easy process and it keeps the ADE OS network config.