Scale limit for 2 node 3595

[amarrai]

Hi Team,  

I have a question form a partner around Cisco's stance on exceeding recommend scales on the 3595 platform. The end customer currently has less than the 10,000 recommend devices on their current 2 node deployment, however they are looking to move up to 12,000 soon. the question from the partner is ' can we still use a 2 node deployment model as we are only 20% over the recommend number of 10,000'?. Ideally they would move to a 4 node deployment however the ask is still can we get away with 2 nodes of 3595. 

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks  

[Damien Miller · Accepted solution]

A 2 node 3595 deployment will support 20,000 active endpoint sessions so you are still well within the supported range.

Adding 2 more 3595's, a hybrid deployment, wouldn't increase scale beyond 20k. In order to increase beyond 20k you need to move to a dedicated node deployment model where the pan and mnt roles are on their own dedicated boxes, and psns also on their own. With dedicated nodes you can scale 3595's to 500k by adding psns.

Edit for clarity:
With 2.6 you can increase scale of standalone and hybrid deployments beyond 20k active endpoints if you move to larger templates / SNS appliances. A 3655 will support 25k active endpoints, and 3695's will support up to 50k active endpoints.  The above is specific to the 3595 VM template or SNS-3595 appliance running either 2.4 or 2.6.