Cisco ISE VM vs Hardware question

pmlam3274 · ‎10-24-2016

Hi. I am currently looking to replace all EOL ISE 3355 hardware appliance and i am leaning toward to the VM version. Has anyone deploy the VM ISE on a UCS B series? or it is better to get the hardware appliance (SNS-3515-K9)?

nspasov · ‎10-25-2016

Hi there!

The VM option works just fine as long as:

1. You are running VMware or KVM for your virtualization hypervisor (Others would work too but these are the current supported ones)

2. You have plenty of CPU and memory resources (The ISE OVA would actually reserve its resources)

3. You have enough disk space to be thick provisioned

4. Your UCS/Virtual environment is in good health

I have plenty of customers running on virtual servers that are doing great and I also have a couple of customers that wanted to save money by going with the virtual option to only bite them in the rear when their whole virtual environment took a hit.

Ideally, you should do a hybrid deployment where half of your servers are physical and the other half are virtual. This is a supported design.

I hope this helps!

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