Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) Version 1.2: What's New in Features and Troubleshooting Options

Question

With Ali Mohammed
Welcome to the Cisco Support Community Ask the Expert conversation. This is an opportunity to learn and ask questions about what’s new in Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) Version 1.2 and to understand the new features and enhanced troubleshooting options with Cisco expert Ali Mohammed.
Cisco ISE can be deployed as an appliance or virtual machine to enforce security policy on all devices that attempt to gain access to network infrastructure. ISE 1.2 provides feature enrichment in terms of mobile device management, BYOD enhancements, and so on. It also performs noise suppression in log collection so customers have greater ability to store and analyze logs for a longer period.
Ali Mohammed is an escalation engineer with the Security Access and Mobility Product Group (SAMPG), providing support to all Cisco NAC and Cisco ISE installed base. Ali works on complicated recreations of customer issues and helps customers in resolving configuration, deployment, setup, and integration issues involving Cisco NAC and Cisco ISE products. Ali works on enhancing tools available in ISE/NAC that are required to help troubleshoot the product setup in customer environments. Ali has six and a half years of experience at Cisco and is CCIE certified in security (number 24130).
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Because of the volume expected during this event, Ali might not be able to answer each question. Remember that you can continue the conversation on the Security community, sub-community shortly after the event. This event lasts through September 6, 2013. Visit this forum often to view responses to your questions and the questions of other community members.

Answer 1

Hi Ali,
We currently have a two-node deployment running 1.1.3.124, as depicted in diagram:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/security/ise/1.2/upgrade_guide/b_ise_upgrade_guide_chapter_010.html#ID89
Question 1:
After step 1 is done, node B becomes the new primary node.
What's the license impact at that stage, when the license is mainly tied to node A, the previous primary PAN?
Step 3 says to obtain a new license that's tied to both node A & node B, as if it's implying an issue would arise, if we leave node B as the primary PAN, instead of reverting back to node A.
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Question 2:
When step 1 is completed, node B runs 1.2, while node A runs 1.1.3.124.
Do both nodes still function as PSN nodes, and can service end users at that point? (before we proceed to step 2)
Both nodes are behind our ACE load balancer, and I'm trying to confirm the behavior during the upgrade, to determine when to take each node out of the load balancing serverfarm, to keep the service up and avoid an outage.
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Question 3:
According to the upgrade guide, we're supposed to perform a config backup from PAN & MnT nodes.
Is the config backup used only when we need to rollback from 1.2 to 1.1.3, or can it be used to restore config on 1.2?
It also says to record customizations & alert settings because after  the upgrade to 1.2, these settings would change, and we would need to  re-configure them.
Is this correct? That's a lot of screen shots we'll need to take; is there any way to avoid this?
It says: "
Disable services such as Guest, Profiler, Device Onboarding, and so on before upgrade and enable them after upgrade. Otherwise, you must add the guest users who are lost, and devices must be profiled and onboarded again."
Exactly how do you disable services? Disable all the authorization policies?
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/security/ise/1.2/upgrade_guide/b_ise_upgrade_guide_chapter_01.html#reference_4EFE5E15B9854A648C9EF18D492B9105
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Question 4:
The 1.1 user guide says the maximum number of nodes in a node group was 4.
The 1.2 guide now says the maximum is 10.
Is there a hard limit on how many nodes can be in a node group?
We currently don't use node group, due to the lack of multicast support on the ACE-20.
Is it a big deal not to have one?
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/customer/docs/security/ise/1.2/user_guide/ise_dis_deploy.html#wp1230118
thanks,
Kevin