Should I go to ISE 2.2?

No.

I know. You’re probably wondering why. ISE 2.2 is the long term release so it’s supposed to be supported longer than 2.1 or 2.3. The answer is based solely on my personal experience, my customer’s experience, and the experience of other engineers I’ve talked to. We’ve seen so many issues with ISE 2.2 that it’s become a running joke that you only upgrade/install it for “bad” customers.

There have been too many stability issues. I’m not only talking about the UI. I’ve seen issues with services not starting properly due to bugs. The worst was when services on a PSN running in a VM wouldn’t start because the the VM was configured with more than 32GB of RAM. That is bad because that’s how the VM was supposed to be configured in order to match a physical SNS-3595 server!

What do I recommend instead? I highly recommend ISE 2.1 and 2.3. I know 2.3 is a new release but Patch 1 has already been released. I personally like 2.3 because of two new features: The improved policy sets UI and Facebook login for guest access. The interface is also noticeably faster than previous versions. Release 2.3 is the release that is almost completely HTML5 based. From what I’ve been told, only the quick search feature (magnifying glass in the top-right of the UI) still relies on Flash.

Update: With the release of the corrected Patch 6 and Patch 7, I have changed my stance on ISE 2.2. It is now a solid “maybe”. I still prefer release 2.3.

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