ISE Smart Licencing

[rkazmierczak]

Hi,

I assume that with smart licencing, we can "share" all licences (base, plus apex) between diffrent ISE clusters (PANs), including those in diffrent geographic regions?

Thanks,

Rafal

[Jason Kunst]

Yes see the note at the bottom in this thread

https://communities.cisco.com/thread/85383?start=0&tstart=0&mobileredirect=true

[rkazmierczak]

Hi Jason, I've actually seen it but was not sure if it was a correct one. Good to confirm that. thanks

[avallely]

I have seen both threads referred to in this post and I need to clarify something re smart license pooling.

In the use case the customer has three DC geographically distributed - US, APJ and EMEA

They are considering three ISE instances to avoid latency issues, however this is far from confirmed.  I know that the total number of licenses can be pooled across the three ISE Cubes, however are those license consumed and returned to the Smart License server when not in use i.e., Netops guy is does some work in the US DC, logs out and then logs into APJ.  If they need (say) 1000 license, would they need 1000 for each ISE Cube or would the license automatically be available for another ISE Cude?

Thanks,

Andy.

[Damien Miller]

The deployments needs to pull from the same virtual smart account as the basis for this. But the issue here will not be how the smart account pools licenses for deployments to use, but rather how ISE reports license usage.

License usage is not instant like the live sessions counter is on the dashboard. ISE self reports to the cloud, but on scheduled intervals. If the same 1000 endpoints were moving around three separate deployments, then you wouldn't use just 1000 licenses. ISE records intervals throughout the day then reports peak license counts on a daily basis. I've never had to keep a close eye on this as I've never had a customer that tight on licensing that it mattered.

In theory you could use double/triple licenses, but probably only if the deployments covered the same geography and endpoints bounced between them.

[hslai · Accepted solution]

Internally, we have a number of ISE deployments in different Cisco labs in different geo locations sharing the same pool of smart licenses.