ISEv 2.3 to ISEv 2.4 - migration of 100k BSE licenses

[mohallib]

Hello Team!

A customer needs to shift his 100k BSE licenses from an old virtual ISE (2.3 or lower) to 2.4 or higher. 

Plan from partner is to deploy the new ISE and migrate piece by piece all Devices (time window approx. 110 days).

His question is:

a) Is it possible to use same licenses on both machines during the migration?

or

b) Can he cover the migration time with test licenses behind 90 days? After finishing this phase he will import the existing licenses.

Problem from our side is... we don't know the old design and if they have technical assistance.

BR

Moritz

[Nidhi]

Does the customer have smart license ? if yes, the licence can be distributed between deployments

[mohallib]

That's a good question. 

Is SmartLicensing possible below 2.4?

[Nidhi]

ISE 2.3 has smart licensing 

[mohallib]

Ah, sorry... it is a ISE2.1 deployment.


* 12 VMs (2xPAN/2xMNT/8xPSN)

[Nidhi]

smart licensing was introduced from 2.1 onwards.

[paul · Accepted solution]

A couple of points here:

1. With traditional licensing there is no tracking in a central location how the licenses are being used.  So you can send a message to licensing@cisco.com saying you are upgrading to 2.4 and want to rehost your licenses onto the 2.4 deployment.  This will have absolutely no effect on the old deployment.
2. What you should do is ask licensing@cisco.com to convert the 100k licenses to smart licenses and use smart licensing in your 2.4 deployment.  This will have no effect on the old deployment.

[mohallib]

Thanks!

Thats the solution!

Unfortunately atm the partner are not allowed to use smart account. It's still under internal approval but point 1 will help us in the beginning and we will migrate to smart account after every internal barrier is tear down. 

BR

Moritz

[paul · Accepted solution]

You don't need to have access to the Smart Account. I do the conversation all the time for my customers. Get the Smart Account and Virtual Account name the customer wants to use and send a message to licensing@cisco.com. Let them know you are doing an upgrade for the customer and want to migrate their licenses to smart licensing as part of the upgrade.