Cisco ACS 5.1 License Question

[dumlutimuralp]

Hi all,

We have a Cisco ACS 5.1 installation consisting of two appliances. We have 2180 devices configured in Network Device Group list. However ACS 5.1 has a base license which supports 500 devices. So we have received an error saying that "Device count exceeded" related to the licensing. However when we put this environment in production we observe that authentication requests are handled without any problems. As a precaution we configured "Default Network Device" feature to put us in the safe zone in terms of licensing issues.

We will consolidate the Network Device Group list to summarize the entries from /32 devices to /24 device groups. However I am curious how come the authentication requests can be handled even when the license has been exceeded. Anyone knows what happens when you receive this message about licensing.

Thanks in advance.

[Tiago Antunes]

Well, this is a nice topic.

Please note that the ACS counts the AAA devices checking the mask on the AAA device configuration.

Meaning that if you have a /24 mask on a AAA client, it will mean 256 devices.

Now, the message is simply annoying and will always show up if the device count exceeds the license count, but it will still work...

So in the ende you can have a base license but use >500 NADs, if you don't mind getting that message everytime the GUI is launched.

HTH,
Tiago