Happy New 2019!
About a year ago, we have started a journey to make ISE even more the robust solution our customers expect it to be.
This journey is a journey everyone subscribed with – our Engineering team have and are investing a huge amount of resources to ensure that ISE’s code is simply better, in terms of robustness and quality, our testing environments are better and continually improving, our processes are better in terms of maintaining high quality, and today we are announcing another milestone in this journey. ISE 2.4, our latest release, had made it to the “Suggested Release” milestone!
We are pleased to announce that version 2.4 of the Identity Services Engine (ISE), a Long Term Release, is now tagged as the “Suggested Release” for all customers. This version was initially released on March 29, 2018 and 2.4, Patch 5 was released on Nov 27, 2018. Tagging ISE 2.4 as the “Suggested Release” is a big step forward in delivering quality software to our customers. Prior to this, we had two different “suggested releases” for two different types of customers. With this step, we now have a single release that has been really stable in hundreds of customer deployments.
Call for action - upgrade to 2.4 patch 5 (or latest 2.4 patch):
All customers looking to deploy ISE, whether as a standalone product or as part of their Cisco Software Defined Access deployment together with Cisco DNA Center, are encouraged to check out the 2.4 release with Patch 5 at least. For more information about the 2.4 release, please visit product support.
To make it easier for customers to make the right selection of software, when a user goes to cisco.com’s download center, the “Suggested Release” would have a star icon tagging it as such:
In order to ensure we are focusing our investment, in parallel to this announcement we have announced the End of Sale of ISE 2.0, 2.0.1, 2.1 and ISE 2.3. While customers will still receive full support for these releases prior to these release transition into the “Maintenance Support” phase, we do believe that customers should migrate to ISE 2.4 as soon as possible. Please consult the EoS bulletins below for additional information.
What's in a number?
On a slightly more forward-looking note, we'd like to take the opportunity and update that we will be naming / numbering our coming release 2.6 and not 2.5 as we originally planned. As 2.6 is also going to be a release full of capabilities and improvements, we'd like to make it a long term release. For sake of simplicity, we're trying to keep our long term releases (LTRs) numbered even. So no content change, no date change - just the number changes.
Resources (CCO access required):
ISE 2.4 Download Page
ISE End of Sale Bulletins
Hopefully this will make your 2019 even more successful!
Sincerely,
The Cisco ISE Product Management Team
