Cisco ACS 4.2 - Max Hosts and Virtualization

[Mark Rigby]

Greetings, we are looking at deploying ACS 4.2 in our estate to support AAA services, essentially all we want to achieve is the ability control access to a variety of Cisco network devices (Switches, Routers, Firewalls) as well as perform command accounting functions.

I appreciate that v5.2 is now avaliable but it appears too feature rich and expensive for our needs, however after checking the data sheets for 4.2 im unable to determine the maximum number of hosts 4.2 will support or whether it is possible to virtualize the Windows host that ACS will be installed on?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Regards

[andamani · Accepted solution]

Hi Mark,

The following link gives the details of the max AAA clients and users that can be configured.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/net_mgmt/cisco_secure_access_control_server_for_windows/4.2/user/guide/Overvw.html#wp827669

It says the following:

Maximum users supported by the  ACS internal database—There is no theoretical limit to the number of  users the ACS internal database can support. We have successfully  tested ACS with databases in excess of 100,000 users. The practical  limit for a single ACS authenticating against all its databases,  internal and external, is 300,000 to 500,000 users. This number  increases significantly if the authentication load is spread across a  number of replicated ACS instances.

Maximum number of AAA clients  supported— ACS has been tested to support AAA services for  approximately 50,000 AAA client configurations. This limitation is  primarily a limitation of the ACS memory.

You can install the ACS 4.2 on a windows machine and it works fine. it runs perfect on virtual machines as well.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Anisha

P.S.: please mark this thread as answered if you feel your query is resolved. Do rate helpful posts.

[Mark Rigby]

Excellent reply, thak you Anisha.

Regards

[Jatin Katyal]

Further to Anisha's reply; Installation on Vmware was introduced in ACS v4.1, please check the tested/supported specifications with 4.2

•VMWare ESX server 3.0.0

•RAM—16.0 GB

•Processor—AMD Opteron Dual core

•HDD—300 GB

•Number of Virtual machines—4

•Guest operating system—Windows 2003 Standard Edition

•RAM for each guest operation system—3 GB

For more info;

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/net_mgmt/cisco_secure_access_control_server_for_windows/4.2/installation/guide/windows/install.html

Rgds, Jatin