On Fri, 2017-10-06 at 20:41 +0000, Christopher J. Wolff wrote:
Is anyone successfully deploying ISE 2.X? I’m six months into it on about 10,000 endpoints and it seems like it’s a highly challenged product. I’d love to hear your experiences on or off-list. Thanks in advance.
ISE is challenging. I helped deploy and manage a 2.1.0.474 installation with about 5,000 end points. The hardest part was designing the access policies There is also some quirkiness depending on what switches you have in your environment. Different switches and different IOS levels require in some cases slightly different switchport configurations. Keeping everything in sync can also be painful. I ended up writing a web based tool to audit the switch configurations. The device profiler is less than perfect. We ended up having to statically configure some of the devices (notably printers and thin clients) to get them authorized correctly. Sometimes the RADIUS sessions from a switch to the ISE servers would hang in odd ways which required shutting and reenabling the port. Looking at the logs on the switches was vital to sorting out various issues. We also have DHCP snooping enabled in our environment which further complicated debugging. Also be aware upgrading the software can be painful and takes a long time. Our last upgrade required 18 hours of time. Mostly this was waiting around for the software to do the upgrade. Having an environment where you have redundancy is really a requirement for deploying ISE. Conversion to ISE also needs to be done switch by switch with lots of hand holding the users. Users do get irritated when their computers no longer work. A good communications plan is vital to be successful. -- Smoot Carl-Mitchell System/Network Architect voice: +1 480 922-7313 cell: +1 602 421-9005 smoot@tic.com