Hi ,
We are looking for a honest advise . We are about to start ISE deployment within Q3 2018 and will be closing purchase may be in 2 weeks.However , Cisco ISE product is also in the middle of migration when it comes to VM from one size to multiple size of VM - purchase options..
When we started to look for deployment size some months back , we needed 2 x PAN + 2 X MNT + 14 X PSN ( 7 geographies with redundancy ). The license bundle suited at that time was 2 x R-ISE-10VM-K9= , the classical one size fit all type of requirement .
Now when are just about to sit for a purchase , we saw these part numbers have been marked as legacy in ordering guide and the new part code we will need is R-ISE-VML-K9= x 4 (for PAN & MNT ) + 14 x R-ISE-VMM-K9= ( PSN's ) ---> I may also be wrong here because just saw now there are 3 categories as opposed to 2 which we saw only 4 - 5 weeks ago. Not clear what to fit where but our requirement stays same.
Anyways , the options with multiple size VM licensing seems much more expensive then when we looked at price for VM bundle options earlier. We also see that bundle based options ( R-ISE-10VM-K9= ) is still orderable and also FAQ section says we can get them converted to new types for free .
Although it seems a bit hard to beileve that we will be able to do this kind of hack and save our self some money , but if it possible to do so what are the cons ? some of things i can think of is having to build a personna from scratch when a new version like 2.5 , 2.6 etc comes out and the new versions do not support old license type.
Any advice ? Basic idea is we are not a existing customer but will be very soon . how does our change and Cisco ISE VM change find a good way of growing together happily 
Varun
Internet search show we can still buy R-ISE-10VM-K9 till Q1 19 , then send a mail to ise-vm-license@cisco.com in Q1 19 or whenever we want to go to release later then 2.4 , and then get the grandfathered VM licences at no cost ( or is there a cost ? )
So that way , and the end we get the new VM types and still pay price for bundles VM ( sounds too good to be true ) and like i asked before , will that mean building from scratch or is there a migration path of sorts ? if we build from scratch there is a possibility of downtime in running operations.
If you already have previous VM licenses, you can reach out to ise-vm-license@cisco.com with your Sales Order number to get keys for the new sizes of VMs. Also take note that Cisco ONE and Enterprise Agreements both provide the new form of licensing.
Varun
