Upgrading ACS 5.8.1.4

[spfister336]

Is there an upgrade path from ACS 5.8.1.4 to ISE, or is it a separate product? There is no data (yet) to migrate, so this is mostly a question about licensing

[ajc]

For tacacs a separate license is required if you eventually need TAC support. People here say that it is not necessary but I installed it

[spfister336]

So you're saying there no upgrade path for ACS? We need to throw it away and buy a separate product if we want ISE?

[ajc]

We have 2 old CSACS-1121 currently running 5.8 and we are migrating to ISE 2.3 because those devices are end of sale/support.

Based on my understanding, you cannot reuse/convert ACS appliances into ISE (unless you are running ACS VM's on a Cisco UCS but still some hw specs must be covered).

ISE is the replacement for ACS infrastructure

[spfister336]

What we have is not an appliance. It is a VM running under our VMWare servers. Seems kind of strange to consider ISE as a "replacement" for ACS if you can't upgrade from the one to the other. Seems like more people would upgrade if you didn't have to throw out ACS totally in order to "replace" it with ISE. Why does Cisco make it so hard?

[ajc]

The migration process implies 2 separated devices/VM's and a migration tool running in a laptop (Win based) in the same subnet to make it easier. In fact, I configured a VM running ISE 2.3 and another running the ACS 5.8 (on which I restored the production configuration once the version/patch were installed). Then I ran the migration tool to transfer the config from one platform to the other one.

The migration process is very straightforward but I can share later my notes and considerations about it.

[spfister336 · Accepted solution]

We have no data to migrate, so migration isn't really what I'm interested in.

So, you had to buy a completely new server in order to migrate your data to?

[ajc]

Let me be clear. You cannot convert (reimage) an ACS appliance into ISE appliance.

In your specific case you can use your UCS Server (so no money is spent on new hardware) and create an ISE VM running version 2.3 with tacacs license installed (if needed). Check with Cisco if you can exchange your existing ACS licenses into ISE ones.

On my case, that is exactly what happened. I cannot convert ACS into ISE so I reuse an existing UCS Server and did the whole migration from ACS 5.8 into ISE 2.3 using VM's and a laptop running the migration tool as explained before.

[spfister336]

Well, in our specific case, we don't have a UCS server. If we have to buy the server software all over again, I guess we need to evaluate our options.