Expected time to install ISE 2.2 on SNS-3495

[Nicholas DiNofrio]

I have a customer whom have recently performed a reimage (reinstall ISE 2.2 software) on a SNS-3495 appliance.   They connected the local PC to the appliance to the Ethernet 1 interface, and during the installation to format whole hard drive disk and install rpm files to get to the setup script took approx. 7 hours.

Everything seems to be working fine but they are concern about the time taken to install.    In the past they install ISE software the same way and has taken them only 1 hour, as reported.

We checked hardware LED indicator lights and nothing was found to suspect any hardware issues or faults of any kind.

Is it expected to take this long to install ISE 2.2 software in this way and would CIMC configuration be a possible contributing factor, for example, does the data transfer rate via CIMC KVM Console can change if connected to appliance's management port versus using the Ethernet NIC interface/port ?

I'm looking for guidance in how to troubleshoot this type of issue and if there is some sort of log created by the ISE installer that we can reference?

[Arne Bier]

Not a big fan of hardware appliances for many reasons but if they cannot be avoided then you have to go down that route.  Have you looked around in CIMC to see whether the disk sub system is in good shape?  i.e. the health of the individual drives, and the raid configuration.

I think the transfer of the .iso via the KVM should be relatively quick. Did you experience long install times AFTER the 'setup' prompt?

Did you watch the screen when the ISE installer performs the disk IO throughput tests (MB/s tests) ?  That might be an indicator.  The install logs might still be available for inspection.  In most VM systems the throughput is between 500-900MB/s and that makes for a speedy system.  Not sure what one can expect from a 3495 appliance.

[hslai · Accepted solution]

The early stages of the installation are not logging anything to disks and ADE.log captures some entries at the last stage. During installation, we may use the virtual consoles to see some info, especially Console 4 (ctrl+alt+f4). CSCvh31507 is a doc bug on 3495 and CIMC 3.x and recommending to use CIMC 2.x instead. No other known issues I know of. Seven hours do seem lengthy.

[Nicholas DiNofrio]

Thanks, I will take all this into account and will gather the CIMC Technical Support Data to see if that points us in the right direction.

Thank you for all the helpful information.