ISE license for K12 school districts

[pacavell]

Can anyone offer any guidance on a rule of thumb for how many ISE base/plus licenses would be typical for a school district that is interested in ISE for wired/wireless NAC including profiling? I'm thinking that there might be a rule of thumb based on student count. The reason I ask is that ISE Base/Plus licenses are based on "active" sessions, which would in all likelihood be a subset of all the wired/wireless devices that could be at the school district (laptops, tablets, smartphones, IOT devices, etc). Thanks for any guidance.

[Arne Bier]

I have heard 5 devices per student bandied about. Student attendance should (in theory) be consistently high, therefore student population count is a reliable source for a user count to plan for licenses.

Guest is another use case that will eat up licenses for non-student counts. 

And don't forget admin staff (5 devices per staff member).

If ISE is enabled with Cisco Smart Licensing, then the management can keep track of this (looking at the Smart Licensing dashboard and receiving reports etc. - no need for then to have an ISE login). That allows a pay as you grow approach. Just add more licenses to the pool when needed. Smart Licensing also allows licenses to be moved elsewhere if needed. It's a very fluid process.

[pacavell]

Assuming 30,000 students and 5 devices per student. If that's what I base my ISE license count on that is 150,000 licenses. Seems quite high. I've got a school district with 50,000+ students on ISE wired/wireless and their max session count never goes above 20,000.

[Jason Kunst · Accepted solution]

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@pacavell wrote:

Assuming 30,000 students and 5 devices per student. If that's what I base my ISE license count on that is 150,000 licenses. Seems quite high. I've got a school district with 50,000+ students on ISE wired/wireless and their max session count never goes above 20,000.

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Why would you project 5 devices per student? With ISE we deal with active endpoint mac addressed. So even though a student could use up to 5 devices, likely they are only using 1 or 2 at a time right?

[pacavell]

I agree Jason. That's why I raised the question.

[Jason Kunst · Accepted solution]

Ok please accept solution as well ☺