ISE Appliance or VM

[mateojaxon]

I need to make a decision on purchasing new ISE appliances or deploying as VM's. Where are the 36xx series ISE appliances in there lifecycle?  We have had consultants suggest that the appliance is the way to go and the VM's are not as stable.  Does anyone have experience with this?

[balaji.bandi]

Good questions, always go with Appliance here.

1. If your VM ware managed by another department, you do not have much control

2. ISE CPU and memory and HDD Intensive, VMware some time your HDD speed not match (that lead to performance issue)

3. Appliance dedicatedly build for ISE, they meant to be ISE only.

I do not see any advantage people say to me VM (or virtual) not convinced myself. but again it all depends on how you view business requirements.

Note: Personally seen Many VM does not give as expected results if your data constantly writing (until you have Dedicated full flash or SSD) get as expected results until you dedicated to the blades to services,. instead, why not get out of it and use the appliance, so easy to maintain.

[marce1000 · Accepted solution]

 - FYI : https://community.cisco.com/t5/security-documents/ise-appliance-versus-vm-comparison/ta-p/3615651

 M.

[DMel]

For my opinion, in both jobs where I have used ISE we never had the physical appliance. I have used the ISE VM in VMWare, KVM, and HyperV forms. I personally think that I had best performance with the KVM installation, but didn't stay with it because nothing else in the company was run on KVM.

HyperV for me has worked without issue, but you do have to be mindful of proper resource assignment from the HyperVisor. Mostly the HDD read/write is important.

My current company we have been running ISE since v2.7 and have upgraded to our current v3.1p1 with very little operational issues. I've never had more than 1200 users with my ISE implementations, though.