Cisco ISE upgrade 2.7 to later version - SNS-3515-K9 to SNS-3715-K9

[AigarsK]

Hi All,

Before anyone says, yes SNS-3515-K9 feels slow even on 2.7.
I am trying to maximize organisations investment in Cisco ISE and as the SNS-3515-K9 is going EOL June next year, I am shopping for new Cisco ISE hardware. I know that 36x5 is recommended upgrade path, but 37x5 is out and available for purchase (lead times aside) and is what I am gearing towards as upgrade to platform.

Issue I have seen is to do with supported version on platforms, I see that 3515 does support up to ISE 3.0, but 3715 only shows up as supported hardware for ISE version 3.1 in which 3595 is the lowest hardware version supported.

Question is, is this just what got validate on new 37x5 platform and I should be fine to have new appliance added to the deployment with version 2.7?
If not what are my options to migrate from 3515 with 2.7 to recommended version 3.2 on 3715 hardware?

[balaji.bandi]

Personally i would not go upgrade path.

If you buyind new hardware - got with latest ISE stable version 3.2 or 3.3 depends on the requirement, and deploy in the network and do the cutover when all tested offline in line with exiting ISE 2.7 in place.

[AigarsK]

Appreciate the advise, but to have exact carbon copy of exiting setup leaves a lot of room for human errors.

There surely must be a migration path for it, I see one potential issue due to physical interface count which now down to 2x copper and 2x sfp. and would only guess that 37x5 was not validated to be compatible with earlier version of Cisco ISE than 3.1 which was out at the time of release.

Would appreciate second opinion on this.

[Greg Gibbs · Accepted solution]

There is a direct upgrade path from version 2.7 to 3.2, so you can perform a backup of the 2.7 instance and restore it to the new hardware running 3.2.

See the ISE 3.2 Upgrade Journey document for more details.

[AigarsK]

Thanks Greg,

I was not sure if backup restore from 2.7 to later version is going to be an option, if anything I will have both appliances side by side for time and I have 2 node deployment, so should have time to perform a test on isolated network before I go do it in for good.

[balaji.bandi]

you can install new version and restore from old ISE - look that options