Is live migration feature of Hyper-V supported for ISE?

[Harini]

Hello,

Can someone confirm if live motion feature of Hyper-V supported for ISE?

There is a specific mention of support for vMotion in the installation guides but none regarding live motion.

Thanks in Advance.

Regards,

Harini

[Craig Hyps · Accepted solution]

Correct.  It was not tested.

[stuart.pannell]

Hello to anyone who might be from Cisco, you say that you support ISE 2.3 on Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor 2012 R2. Would this include all of the features that this Hypervisor has for example "Live Migration"? Would you support a customer that has deployed ISE 2.3 on Microsoft Hyper-V and are using "Live Migration" as there preferred redundancy method?

I just need to know as I have a customer that wants ISE, needs it to be redundant and already has Hyper-V

[Craig Hyps]

Same response as previous.  We have not specifically tested live migration with Hyper-V so do not officially endorse nor censure its use.  The official stance is that we already provide high availability and redundancy mechanisms in the product that do not require its use.  Therefore, customer is free to test behavior, but TAC cannot be expected to troubleshoot any issues specific to Live Migration if encountered with its use.  You can raise enhancement request with Cisco sales team if feel there is sufficient business justification for its QA testing.

/Craig

[stuart.pannell]

Hi Craig,

So I presume that you are a Cisco representative? The bottom line then is if using VMware's Hypervisor then Vmotion is a supported redundancy mechanism though if using Microsoft's Hyper-V you have to have multiple ISE nodes to provide the redundancy. If I am running multiple nodes on Hyper-V and getting replication issues will TAC support my configuration? I am just trying to bottom out what will/won't be supported for my customer as I will be running POC and shortly after that will being going live.

[Craig Hyps]

QA team had tested vMotion and found it to not impact deployment.  Note: vMotion of storage is not tested nor endorsed.  That said, vMotion is not the recommended redundancy mechanism for ISE deployment. It was tested and not found to cause any issues. The deployment of Primary and Secondary nodes, along with Backup and Restore operations is still the recommended mechanisms to deliver redundancy.

vMotion may provide a level of flexibility and automation, but is transparent to ISE operations.  If implement Live Migration and find that the database was to become corrupt or other issue occurs, you cannot expect TAC to troubleshoot root cause of the issue as it relates to Live Migration and expect a defect to be filed against ISE to resolve.  Many functions at the hypervisor level may be transparent to the ISE VM guest, but issues related to these features cannot be directly supported by TAC, especially when not QA tested for sanity operation.  The extended features may work perfectly well, but their use would be at customer discretion and risk.  Again, please consider testing in lab and be sure to implement standard ISE redundancy measures so that if encounter issues, you have a way to recover that is officially supported.

/Craig

[stuart.pannell]

Hi Craig,

Thank you, this  is a better answer that I can go to my customer with. It gives us proper reason to deploy a minimum of 2 ISE nodes in HA and not use any of the Hypervisor redundancy mechanisms.