Maximum Scale Limits

[mibesset]

Multiple organizations are looking to combine their network architecture in the future. They want to understand if they do a joint dot1x solution, can ISE scale to the limits. There would be over 1M endpoints after integration took place. Reviewing the ISE performance and scale guide, we are limited to 500,000 endpoints today. While it is a lot, are we looking to grow that number, or is it a hardware limit? What does the future hold for larger deployments?

[Damien Miller · Accepted solution]

You are unlikely to get an answer to this on the public communities and I am not at liberty to share the information I have seen.  A discussion with the ISE business unit would be required and information in the slide decks shared with partners has changed over in the past six months.  Not sure how accurate it is anymore. 

A quick question to confirm.  When you say 500k endpoints on each, is that active or total?  Currently with v2.2+, ISE will handle 500k active and 1.5 Million known. 

[mibesset]

Thank you Damien. This was an idea for 1M+ active endpoints running at a time, but I'll have to talk to the team in the future to see if it's even an option.

[Craig Hyps]

Actually, ISE 2.1+ supports the increased scale of 500k active and 1.5M persisted in endpoint database.

Most customers never approach the 500k ACTIVE, i.e. 500,000 unique sessions connected at one time--not over a period of hours, day, or other extended period. Other vendors rarely quote scale in this fashion so numbers will often seem inflated.  Due to around the sun activity, many customers will experience only a fraction of user/device base connected at any one time.

ACTIVE = Session starts with RADIUS Accounting Start and ends with RADIUS Accounting Stop.