ISE 3.4 Patch 3

[renzanjo-caparas]

Hi everyone! 

Good day and greetings!

Does anyone here upgraded your ISE devices to 3.4 Patch 3? Did you guys encountered any issues and bugs?

Regards

[Torbjørn]

The upgrade went smoothly for my lab deployment and I have not encountered any new bugs. If your production deployment already is on 3.4 I would probably upgrade, otherwise I would wait for it to become recommended.

[Arne Bier]

I'm in the same situation as @Torbjørn - I patch my lab to see the outcome but I have not been testing a lot lately. Seems ok, apart from the lack of ansible support in ISE 3.4 - but that's an issue for people who use ansible to manage their ISE environments - I hope I am wrong, but it seems Cisco BU has abandoned the ansible ise collection, and it will be dropped from the next ansible release (v12). Really unfortunate, because I was just starting to make some inroads with this stuff.

[Torbjørn]

It does seem that you're right. There hasn't been any updates to the git repo since January and I found the following PR under ansible community: https://github.com/ansible-community/ansible-build-data/pull/560. That's a real problem... 

[PSM]

Hello Everyone, Ansible collection support is not a big issue. You can still use REST APIs of ISE in Ansible. This is the way we have been using it and it is not dependent on anyone to maintain ISE collection in Ansible. Rest someone from Cisco Devnet can comment if there is any plan to resume maintenance on collection.

[Arne Bier]

@PSM - the value of a tool such as ansible, lies in creation and usage of modules - popularised in the Linux world and then found its way into other parts of IT. Cisco started out with the ise collection and the 445 modules they provide make life easier for someone wanting to automate their ISE deployment - that's the whole point of this, isn't it? . Anyone can run a curl, postman, python REST API call to ISE - I don't feel like using ansible to craft my own API calls to ISE. 

I wasn't trying to say that we should not upgrade to ISE 3.4 because of this ansible saga - I just wished someone from the BU would respond and tell us what's going on.

[PSM]

@Arne Bier agree with you "the value of a tool such as ansible, lies in creation and usage of modules". Most of the automation which we use ansible is against NAD devices and then related tasks against ISE. For us it has been working quit ok. But off course modules are nicer and efficient.