ISE deployment Smart License allocation

[francois-smith]

Good day everyone 

We have an old ISE deployment that was registered to a license that will expire in the beginning of December 2025. This deployment is EOL and will be replaced by a new ISE deployment. 

A new license was procured that will expire in 2028 and was intended for the new ISE deployment, this license was then added to the same Virtual Account that old deployment is registered to.

When we logged into the Smart License portal and we look under the old PAN license usage details we see the Essentials license with 2 orders under it, the one that ends in December 2025 and the one that is expiring in 2028.

Does this mean that the new order is now tied to the old PAN and when the one order expires that the it would just continue working with the new order or can we generate a new token for the new deployment PAN, register it to the Smart License portal and we will be able to associate it with the new order?

What will happen to old  deployment functionality when the license expires in December 2025 and it does not have any valid license that it is registered to?  Based on our research we found the following:

Continued functionality: Authentications and features will continue to work as they were configured prior to the expiration.

Does this mean that even though the deployment is not registered with any valid license that all the endpoints that were previously able to authenticate would continue to do so for an indefinite period or is there a time period after which the deployment would stop processing all authentications and essentially render the old deployment completely out of operation?

Would it be possible to have the new deployment with a valid license servicing the company while the old deployment is still able to handle authentication requests with the administration accounts in read only mode?

[Aref Alsouqi]

I think what you are seeing is kinda expected. Probably your new order didn't consider converting/removing the old licenses and that's why you see both of them on your smart account. I think Cisco licensing team can definitely help you with this by removing the old licenses so you can start leveraging the new ones straightaway. Alternatively, if you leave both licenses in your smart account, I think the deployment will switch to the new licenses once the old ones are expired. The answer to your question around if anything would stop in case your deployment is not connected/registered to your smart account is nothing should stop working and you should have 45 days of a grace period where you can go and sort out your licenses issues. But in your case I can't see why you should worry about that. My recommendation would be to get in touch with Cisco licensing team via my case portal and explain to them the situation and ask them to remove the old licenses to kick off the use of the new ones.