ACS 5.4 VMWare Requirements question

[Joshua Engels]

I am reading up on the ACS VMware appliance installation instructions and am a bit confused on the disk space requirements.  It says 60Gb is required and then goes on to talk about 500GB for the secondary instance.  Hoping someone can help clarify what the guide is talking about.  Do I need more than 60gb?  Is the secondary instance a seperate machine or part of the same one?             

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/net_mgmt/cisco_secure_access_control_system/5.4/installation/guide/csacs_vmware.html

[Jatin Katyal]

If you use 60GB HDD, the ACS will automatically turn to evaluation version so if you are going to run it in your lab, you may install it on 60 GB HDD with eval version. However, if it's a production enviornment then you should use 500 GB to avoid any disk issues. The secondary instance would be a seprate box. Cisco recommend to use log collector on 500GB or above because that gonna save all the logs.

Jatin Katyal
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[Joshua Engels]

Okay, I read a bit more and now have a better understanding.  That said, I have a fairly small enviornment.  And being this is in VMWare with all kinds of redundancy, Do I really need more than one server?

[Jatin Katyal]

How small it is, end-points, network devices, vpn and wireless authentication? Can you explain about your setup?

The secondary server requirement helps in following scenario:

1.] If primary goes down the secondary will take over so down time will be zero.

2.] If you need to upgrade primary or make some changes to primary in production enviornment and that may impact its services. Again secondary would help.

3.] Primary will replicate all the changes immediatly to seconday.

Jatin Katyal
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[Joshua Engels]

Our current setup is a VMWare cluster on the UCS B series platform.  We use a single ACS 4.2 Solutions engine today and that is a single hardware failure point for sure.  We have about 150 nodes that log to it for TACACS accounting, and authentication.  Also use it for PEAP authentication for our wireless network which supports about 250 users.  I figured that the VMWare would give me enough redundancy if i were to have a hardware issue.  As far as down time, We are typically a Monday - Friday shop.

[Jatin Katyal]

Implementing a single instance at this time should not be a problem but again you need to keep a close eye on the disk space that how fast it will occupy the space.

you may go through the below listed thread for understanding disk space problems and how to mitigate them.

https://supportforums.cisco.com/thread/2216399

Jatin Katyal
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