ISE 2.0 VM disk sizing - 200GB

[Greg Gibbs]

I have a customer that built their ISE 2.0 VMs with only the minimum disk space of 200GB (as opposed to our recommended sizing per persona). This is a fully distributed deployment of 6 nodes to support 25,000 concurrent endpoints in the near term.

I'm aware that there is no way to grow the database after initial installation, and rebuilding the entire cluster would take a lot of effort.

My initial thought is that the main limitation would be the amount of local logging. The customer logs external to Splunk, so this is not a major concern.

Is there any other potential impact to the PAN and MnT nodes using the minimum disk space? Would there be any issues with storing upgrade images in the future, etc?

[Charlie Moreton]

There will be no impact to the PAN, or the PSNs is the deployment.  They can run fine on 200GB HDD.  The MnT Node is the one that is recommended to be at least 600GB.  However, if all their logging is going to Splunk and they don't want to use ISE for the Reports, etc. then 200GB will suffice.  All this really does is limit the amount of local logs that can be kept.

If they decide later that they DO want to use ISE for this, they would just need to install new VMs with the appropriately sized HD for the MnT and replace what they have.

Just in case, here is the Hardware Installation Guide:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/security/ise/2-0/installation_guide/b_ise_InstallationGuide20/Installing_ISE_on_a_VMware_Virtual_Machine.html

[hslai]

Greg already got the answer from Craig. For archiving,

Slide 54 of BRKSEC-3699 Reference Presentation discusses ISE VM Disk Storage Requirements.