How many are using 2.6 in production?

[Josh Morris]

I just bought eight new 3695s to replace my hybrid environment. They shipped with 2.6, but I re-imaged to 2.4 p9. I expect to migrate to this new environment in the next couple months. I have had a change of heart after talking to different people and I believe 2.6 will become the gold star early in 2020. So I just re-imaged the boxes again back to 2.6 and I'm going to stick to it. Does anyone have any overwhelming reason why I shouldn't do this right now?

[cciesec2011]

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@Josh Morris wrote:

I just bought eight new 3695s to replace my hybrid environment. They shipped with 2.6, but I re-imaged to 2.4 p9. I expect to migrate to this new environment in the next couple months. I have had a change of heart after talking to different people and I believe 2.6 will become the gold star early in 2020. So I just re-imaged the boxes again back to 2.6 and I'm going to stick to it. Does anyone have any overwhelming reason why I shouldn't do this right now?

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Do NOT use ISE version 2.6.  I have seven different tickets with Cisco TAC on this.  Even the TAC engineer is not familiar with version 2.6.  There are many unknown bugs out there with version 2.6.  Cisco has only released patch 2 for version 2.6 means that there is not a wide deployment for this version.  I'll wait until Cisco releases patch 7 or patch 8 for ISE version 2.6 before I can migrate to this version.

Stick with ISE 2.4 patch 10.  It seems to be a stable version.

[yshchory]

Thank you for the insight. As hard as it is to hear this, this is crucial information. I was wondering if you are available for a deeper discussion around this? What we are seeing is totally different from both a TAC case and a bug count / severity. All metrics are actually showing improvement compared to 2.4 which was and is an awesome release from a quality perspective.

Maybe I should have started with a quick intro - I lead the Product Management team and the product line.

Your profile doesn't include any contact information, more than happy to have a direct conversation with you to understand exactly where are the issues. My email is my username @cisco.com

[Arne Bier · Accepted solution]

Hi @Josh Morris 

I can report only one customer who is running ISE 2.6 (unpatched) and they seem to be happy with it. Guest and 802.1X - no major stuff that should NOT work.

Every customer will have a different experience depending on the features they are using. I think it might be more useful to either have a Poll (instead of a discussion) and then see how many customers are on 2.6 or thinking of moving to 2.6

But even a poll would be somewhat meaningless  unless we could plot the result against a landscape of features.  If there is a large chunk of customers running ISE 2.6 and all they need it for is TACACS+ and 802.1X then someone might infer that this is a good release to move to. 

In my own case I had a customer on ISE 2.3 and it was a total nightmare. We moved off as soon as we could, and ISE 2.4 was much better.

But then I currently have a customer on ISE 2.3 that is ticking over very nicely.  Go figure. Some features and product constellations eek out the best/worst in some software. 

It's horses for courses ...