ISE Smart Licensing - Upgrade from PAK

[Cheto]

I cant find my answer on this, but we are currently running 2.7 and getting prepared to upgrade to 3.0 once its labeled as a suggested release. We have PAK licensing, and I want to convert to smart licensing before the upgrade process. 

My question, if I convert my licenses to smart licensing... do the PAK's on the ISE server immediately become inactive / invalid? The documentation says I need to convert them and then open a TAC case to upgrade them to the new license versions. I want to make sure my PAK licenses will not become inactive while I am waiting for TAC to process them to the new standard.

[Marcelo Morais]

Hi @Cheto ,

 first of all ... ISE 3.0+ only supports Smart Licensing.

 Remember that you need a Smart Account to manage your Smart Licensing and to generate the Registration Token.

PS.: please take a look at: ISE 2.7 Admin Guide - Licensing, search for Cisco ISE Smart Licensing.

Hope this helps !!!

[Damien Miller · Accepted solution]

To alleviate your concern, when you get the PAK licenses converted to the Smart account, it leaves the existing PAK licenses in use on the deployment untouched. Once you have confirmed the licensing has been migrated, you can register the deployment to the smart account. 

You end up with two copies of licensing and there is no enforcement of this, it is a ethics and compliance issue at that point. This is essentially why you see 3.0 only supporting smart licensing, it takes the chance of license abuse out of the picture.