ise licensing

[cisco8887]

All,

I have two ISE servers with one base model license.

I understand when using them as failover the license will transfer so no need to purchase two set of licenses.

Is this the same case when you have a primary administration server and policy node or do they then need 2 licenses?

I have licenses for Apex and plus

[Marvin Rhoads]

ISE licenses (e.g., Base, Plus, Apex and Device Admin) are for the entire deployment - whether it's one or 100 distributed nodes.

The support contract is per node so you are required to have Smartnet per node to be eligible for support.

[cisco8887]

so if I undertsand correctly,

if you have a distributed environment with 10 nodes consisting of 1 admin server, 8 policy and 1 monitoring server then you will need 10 licenses for support.

but do you need to but 10 licenses for base ise or just only 1 ?

and now if you have 1k apex license, can that be shared across all 9 excluding the monitoring ?

in cisco documentation it does say the license is replicated from primary to secondary server in admin mode but does not mention anything around needing a license per node

[Marvin Rhoads · Accepted solution]

A support contract is not a license. It's a separate line item in a purchase with an associated term (1, 3 or 5 years typically). For example on an ISE VM, the part number is "CON-SAU-ISEVM".

Licenses are purchased for the entire deployment and are installed on the Primary PAN (Policy Admin Node). If you have a secondary PAN they are replicated to it. Other nodes like MnT, PSN, Device Admin and pxGrid (where such exist) are in supporting roles and act per the licensing on the PAN.

[Charlie Moreton · Accepted solution]

Here's a visual that I hope helps to explain this: