Solved: Re: Test upgrade ISE deyployment

the_wizard · ‎04-13-2020

Hey!

We're currenty running ISE 2.2 Patch 11 in a distrubuted deployment and looking to go and upgrade to 2.6 however I'm a bit worried something will stop working even though we only do wired and wireless AAA.

Is it possible to backup the distributed setup and setup a new ISE which have all roles on only one node and then add a few NAD's to it and test it with a few test clients? I guess the ISE evaluation version would be sufficient for this?

Current setup:

2x PSN

2xMnT

2x PAN

Test setup:

1x PSN,MnT,PAN

Damien Miller · ‎04-13-2020

Yes you can do this. It is quite common for larger ISE customers to have some sort of a lab deployment, and the lab doesn't have to mirror production. There is something to be said about having a like for like set up in production and lab, but it's usually not feasible.

You can take a backup from the production distributed deployment and then restore it to a single node. I would not recommend an evaluation VM. I would recommend you deploy at least a small 3515/3615 with 600 GB drive if you plan to test your upgrade process in the lab. Two of these if you want to test your failover during your upgrade process. If you planned on doing an inline upgrade for production, then it would make sense to deploy a couple 2.2 3515 OVAs for testing.

Keep in mind that you have to restore the backup to a standalone node, if you deploy two nodes and join them in to a deployment, you will have to break it up again to restore.

What you do with the lab probably depends on how you plan on upgrading your deployment or the testing you want to do. The VM's you deploy will be fully licensed for 90 days.

View solution in original post

Damien Miller · ‎04-13-2020

Yes you can do this. It is quite common for larger ISE customers to have some sort of a lab deployment, and the lab doesn't have to mirror production. There is something to be said about having a like for like set up in production and lab, but it's usually not feasible.

You can take a backup from the production distributed deployment and then restore it to a single node. I would not recommend an evaluation VM. I would recommend you deploy at least a small 3515/3615 with 600 GB drive if you plan to test your upgrade process in the lab. Two of these if you want to test your failover during your upgrade process. If you planned on doing an inline upgrade for production, then it would make sense to deploy a couple 2.2 3515 OVAs for testing.

Keep in mind that you have to restore the backup to a standalone node, if you deploy two nodes and join them in to a deployment, you will have to break it up again to restore.

What you do with the lab probably depends on how you plan on upgrading your deployment or the testing you want to do. The VM's you deploy will be fully licensed for 90 days.