ISE 1.2 backup restore questions

[Stephen McBride]

Hi all,

I have been looking at the backup and restore procedure for ISE deployments and have to say I have found the documentation to be somewhat confusing in general. Whilst I get the gist of it I have found numerous areas that are grey. This question is the first of many but here we go.

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/security/ise/1-2/user_guide/ise_user_guide/ise_backup.html#pgfId-1073378

Based on that link to restore a failed primary admin node I am left wondering about the state of the licensing. In a deployment that has the licensing configured to utilise the UDIs of the primary and secondary node what happens after you have rebuilt the primary from the ground up?

As far as I am aware when you run up a new node the UDI changes meaning that the license detail is no longer correct - how does this affect the rebuilt node becoming primary again and do you have to rehost the license to reflect the new UDI?

[Stephen McBride]

Another question I have is about the restoration of monitoring data to a primary monitoring node that has temporarily failed. As per documentation it states that a manual backup should be taken from the secondary node and restored to the primary to essentially provide the missing events during the outage. I have a couple of questions about this process:

1. What happens when the primary monitoring comes back online - does it sync up with the secondary monitoring node effectively overwriting the events the secondary has or does it just continue on its merry way?

2. To restore data to the primary monitoring node do you need to de-register the primary before restoring the backup taken from the secondary and re-join it to the deployment or do you just restore from the primary admin GUI? As far as I can see this still means that there will be a hole in the data for the period of time it takes to restore from backup.