Adding a secondary ISe as a backup system

[joseph.williams@atos.net]

New to this...

I am adding a second ISE to backup my standalone unit. I need help on how to do this, especially licensing.

Do I need more base and plus licenses? APEX licenses? VM licenses? Does the secondary system 'share the licenses kinda like an ASA?

When I change my standalone system to a primary, will it cause an interruption?

Nay help would be appreciated.

[Damien Miller]

Assuming you mean adding a second VM to the same deployment and not having two standalone deployments, then all you need is a second VM license, small/medium/large depending on the scale requirements. A single deployment will share the Base/Apex/Plus licenses. I would recommend converting to smart licensing at the same time, since you will want to rehost the licenses to include the secondary node serial number. Moving to smart licensing will save you time down the road since ISE 3.0+ is smart only.  

You can convert the initial node to primary without an outage, then register the second node as the secondary without impact. 

Edit: if you're using tacacs, you also need enough tacacs node licenses. One per node you enable the device admin feature on.

[joseph.williams@atos.net]

Ok, I think I made a mistake here. I am currently running the sync between the two ISE's BUT the primary one is showing a license warning. I applied my second VM license to the second VM. I think that is a mistake. Right or wrong?

If wrong, how do I remove it from the secondary and do I install it on the primary?

Thanks

[Aref Alsouqi]

Please take a look at my blog post about the steps to add the secondary node to the deployment;

https://bluenetsec.com/adding-a-secondary-ise-node/

[joseph.williams@atos.net]

Ok, I think I made a mistake here. I am currently running the sync between the two ISE's BUT the primary one is showing a license warning. I applied my second VM license to the second VM. I think that is a mistake. Right or wrong?

If wrong, how do I remove it from the secondary and do I install it on the primary?

Thanks