DEPLOYING ISE 2.3

[kajibola]

I am planning to deploy ISE 2.3 for a customer.

I have a colleague that discourage going for ISE 2.3 now due to his own experience with 2.3. Any advise from anyone who has deployed or has information about 2.3?

[paul · Accepted solution]

I have been deploying 2.3 since it came out and have converted 8-10 customers to it.  I wouldn't do anything but 2.3 at this point. 

[Arne Bier]

To answer the question factually we'd need some means of representing ISE versions and feature sets in a matrix, combined with TAC cases, bugs raised and general customer sentiment.  I don't think that information exists (perhaps partially inside Cisco, bug trending etc.) , so we're left with sharing our own opinions - good and bad.

My 2c worth about ISE 2.2 and Sponsored Guest features and TACACS - stay away from it.  I upgraded rebuilt to 2.3 the other day and I have not had a chance to see if it's any better.  Some folks might deploy two nodes and use it for 802.1X wireless and that's it.  No issues most probably.  My advice would be to test the product in the lab as much as possible (which itself can be a costly exercise).

Maybe ISE 2.3 will be the first decent release in the 2.x train.

[paul]

Arne,

You experience is way different than mine. Just going back to the start of 2016 I have done roughly 30 ISE installs all 2.x. I have deployed 2.1 when it first came out, 2.2 when first came out and 2.3 when it first came out. Deployment sizes from 2-20 nodes. Active endpoints from several 1000 to 100,000+. Every feature accept client provisioning (stay away from that like the plague) including all guest scenarios you can think of. No major issues on any of my installs.

We have a different deployment methodology than the Cisco literature that has been honed since ISE 1.0.

Now, I am not saying there haven’t been annoying bugs along the way, but none were show stoppers.

[kajibola]

I have now deployed my first ISE 2.3. It's kind of cool.

Thanks all for your contribution.